“You’d understand if you were a law and order type. If we blurred the lines we couldn’t very well go around arresting people, could we? Instead we’d make excuses for them, and let them go.”
“Got you. Maybe you should find another line of work then, therapeutically speaking.” He pulled out her lipstick, twisted, and painted the lips of one of his statues. The statue vibrated violently, then exploded. He nearly swallowed both of his lips.
“And maybe you should make good on your boasts to track down Clyde Barker to the edges of the multiverse with or without earthly power spots handy.”
“And how do you suggest I go about that?” He pulled out her hair brush, taking it in from different angles, trying to figure out how it worked. He gripped the handle a little more tightly and the knife sprang out of the base.
She stepped out of the light beam into the relative darkness where she did her best work. No lightning flashes tore through her brain to temporarily illuminate the situation, as they usually did in her own form of electroshock therapy. “I don’t know. I half expected to find you in a yoga pose, auming, chanting, wrapped under blankets inside a sweat lodge maybe manufactured out of the porcelain tiled bathroom. Anything but what I walked into.”
“Yeah, right, like I’m going to beat those guys at their own game. Do I look like Zen master material to you?”
“Just the thought of you with a shaved head is enough to give me nightmares. That cranium of yours has just enough facets for this human bodysuit you’re wearing to seem like it was purchased at the five and dime.”
He reached into his pockets and pulled out a vial, which he held up to the crass beam of light angling across the floor like a fallen overhead 12 x 12 beam. “Extracted from the sweat of the handkerchief I grabbed from the gardener swinging the scythe at the new age psychic community.”
“No way.”
“You forget what I do for a living.”
“You excavate dead bodies like some bizarre tomb raider. I mean, I know your medical acumen is good, but…”
“But you continue to underestimate me.”
“Not at all, if you expect me to inject myself with that. I’m not looking to be on tour the rest of my life, just long enough to catch Clyde Barker and put an end to whatever nefarious deeds he’s up to screwing with the multiverse before I even have a chance to reincarnate in one of those parallel universes.”
“I can undo the drug’s effects. Leastways, in theory.”
“That’s not the kind of reassurance I was shopping around for.”
“You forget about Masher, Inc. You forget about Area 51. I’m the man essentially building the future you say is traumatizing you so much. Reason enough to hate me, but certainly not to question my abilities.”
“For the record, you’re just one of innumerable parties, big and small, making the future ahead of time.”
“All the more insurance policy that we can undo the effects of this retrovirus.”
“You wunderkind may be great at moving the hands of time forward ever faster, but not one of you is any good at dialing them back.”
“True,” he said, stepping closer, “but we will have infinite parallel universes in a multiverse from here on out. And at least one should hold the answers we seek.” She swore he was using the closer proximity to her to make her feel claustrophobic, as an incentive to decompress by opening the lid of the coffin on all those parallel universes.
“A needle in a haystack,” she lamented, stepping away from him. “Again, not the kind of assurances I was looking for.”
“Take a leap of faith, Kendra. Live on the wild side. If you want to make your world safe, or at least make it so you feel safe in it no matter how unsafe it is, you’re going to have to let go of control, control you never had by the way, speaking of pathetic coping mechanisms.”
Suddenly, taking in the finery of his apartment one last time, it was the huge flat itself that felt like a tomb, a pharaoh’s tomb, replete with treasures, to be precise. “Fine. I guess if you can’t deliver on your promises, I will have no end of opportunities to end you in one timeline after another.”
“There you go. None of us gets by without a few rationalizations.” He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a black leather pouch, and unzipped it to reveal a collection of fresh syringes.
“And me thinking you were all about natural highs.”
“I am. I inject myself with pregnenolone, any number of natural hormones to keep me flying high, or to snap me out of any depression.”
She shook her head. “That is so disappointing. Besides, I prefer my childlike enthusiasm and boundless energy as an OCD shield theory.”
“Well I hardly think the pharmaceuticals obviates that notion. All the same, some concessions have to be made now that I’m not sixteen anymore.”
“How old are you, out of curiosity?”
“How old do I look?”
“Not a day over thirty-five.”
“Why, thank you. You married a man without knowing how old he was? I’d think you’d have an entire file on me.”
She shrugged. “Putting people under a microscope is my day job. When it comes to my personal life, I could use an aura of mystery. Which I must say, you’re shattering faster than a seven-on-the-Richter-scale earthquake beneath a house of cards.”
He ignored her, rolling up his sleeve, and jabbing the full syringe into his shoulder muscles. After filling another needle, he tried to do the same with her, but she caught his arm and held it. “Remind me why we’re doing this again?”
“You’re doing it because you think, with your psyche wired the way it is, we’re likely to find ourselves in alternate realities less jarring than this one.”
“How did you…?”
“Get inside your head? The same way I have from day one.”
“Damn you. You can at least let me pretend that I have an ounce of privacy in this relationship.”
“If it makes you feel any better, the reason I’m gallivanting off to dimension X is…”
“…because you need to know if your childlike zeal really is an OCD coping mechanism. And to do that you need to cut ties to people, places, and things that could be construed as triggers.”
“Thought you couldn’t live without the mystery.”
“Maybe we’d be exactly as we are now if our personalities weren’t such elaborate defense mechanisms. But I’d rather we be who we are by choice and as a healthy reaction to life rather than out of fear.”
“And that includes your chosen profession of chasing down the biggest threats to the timeline of them all, like this Clyde Barker? Good to know you have your priorities straight in case he turns out to be humanity’s savior instead of the greatest threat we’ve ever faced.”
“Yeah, good to know,” she said, the realization only now dawning on her that she should bloody well check her motives, her emotions, and her hidden agendas at the portal to this next world.
He drove the needle into her shoulder like he was tacking a wake-up notice to her soul.
“You and your rabbit holes you like taking me through,” she said.
THE SOLARIS TIMELINE
FOURTEEN
“Out of curiosity, what were you thinking of before we landed here?” Torin asked.
“Of what it would be like working with you day in and day out at the office. As it is you drive me out of my skull on a good day. I just didn’t think our relationship could take any extra heat.”
“I guess that explains why we landed here.”
“So those really are the two of us we’re looking at?”
He gave her a look halfway between perplexed and condescending. “No, they’re robotic replicas and this is a Westworld-like memorial, a museum piece, forever honoring the great work we did together.”
Kendra gave him a look that was even more muddled than the one he’d given her, the various emotions battling to the surface for prominence. “I know that was meant to be smart-assed, but I must rem
ember to get you to amend your will when we get back. You have enough money to make that fantasy happen, and I’m rather partial to the idea. Beginning to wonder how else I’m going to leave my mark on the world.”
They had materialized in the break room with a wide-windowed view of this timeline’s versions of them on the other side of the window, at their all-too familiar work stations. “Look,” Torin said, pointing, “In this reality I brought my lab to work.” His apparatuses commanded half the squad room; even then, they looked packed in pretty tight, and maybe as if he’d actually managed to fit several laboratories in there with the latest in miniaturization. “It looks like the forensic toys at my disposal allow me to give you real-time feedback, which makes this crazy setup make all the more sense. God, when I get back to my timeline I’m going to make a fortune with this idea.”
“The average person has a more elaborate lab in their house back in our timeline. Only the medieval practices of the NYPD keep you from recognizing as much.”
“Yeah, I guess you have a point.”
“The more salient point is why is everyone acting like they don’t see us?” She eyed the latest detective to come streaming into the break room, grab an energy drink from the dispenser, and walk back out. A couple more investigators were seated at one of the tables jawing away about some case they were working on. Granted the ambient light wasn’t the best, and the high ceilings and walls, both rife with dark wood paneling absorbed what little light there was to go around, making the vending machines glow like a Las Vegas strip by comparison, but really? The ambiance was just as soothing back in her world, detectives not needing to feel like they were getting the third degree under harsh lights the livelong day, probably needing to feel like they were coming home when they were coming to work. Thus explaining the lighting and stage setting applied to frayed nerves like conditioner to split-ended hair.
“I gave you navigational control. Figuring your psyche was more brittle than mine, didn’t want to plop us down in some timeline you couldn’t handle. But as to how we manifest, I had my hand in that. I’ve studied enough quantum physics to know that these parallel universes can bleed into one another, which causes all kinds of anomalous effects. Right now we’re more like ghosts inhabiting their world. If we need to dial up our presence I think I can manage that with a little more concentration.”
“No, this suits me fine. I didn’t realize how much of a Peeping Tom I was. We must remember this little trick when we get back home.” She shook her head at the couple jawing in the break room. “Can’t believe Carmichael had such a thing for Lucenta. Look at them holding hands underneath the folded newspaper. Cloak and dagger aces they aren’t. Damn, I was sure she was lesbian.” She returned her attention to their doppelgangers on the other side of the window. “Well, this version of me is no fashion maven. Get a load of those pumps though. Kill for a pair of those.”
Parallel-Timeline-Kendra had long curly hair dyed spanking yellow and a dark shade of purple in alternating curls. Her lime-green body suit and painted nails made her look like a walking flower budding above the neck and just beyond her sleeves. As to Parallel-Timeline-Torin, he had long straight black hair that draped below his shoulders. From the rest of his attire, it was clear he was working the whole Bohemian artist angle.
Kendra couldn’t help noticing there were quite a few less “oddities” situated about the office in this timeline. Far fewer examples of hi-tech invasiveness. Detectives weren’t much on being early adopters of breaking technology as a rule, most sharing her same rigid mindset; along with a clear sense of right and wrong came an equally defined sense of past, present, and future. None of them much cared to jump into the future any quicker than necessary as a result. That said, everyone also had their own coping mechanisms for dealing with Present Shock, which meant that one man’s technological horror was another man’s technological coping mechanism.
Take the coffee machine. Here it was just a coffee machine. Back home it was a droid that recognized its repeat customers and custom blended their preferred brews from one cup to the next. And first time visitors got treated to mind scans so they never had to suffer an initial cup that wasn’t just perfectly suited to their palate, mood, and cravings at that moment. It wasn’t that “Bob”, the coffee droid disturbed her; it was that he didn’t. She didn’t much like Big Brother intrusiveness that was welcomed. Granted, the Big Brother forces that created Bob were corporate in nature, and not governmental, as little solace as that was. Any crack in her defenses could just mean soon the entire dam would burst holding back the rest of the Big Brother forays into her head where they’d not only know too much about her, they would be crafting who she was without her conscious participation in the takeover, or possibly worse, with her conscious participation.
Take the ambient light. They were actual incandescent bulbs because no one could be bothered to swap them out here for more efficient ones. Back home, it was all biolums, algae colonies living in hermetically sealed habitats, able to sustain themselves on the limited food supply for decades, throwing off a bioluminescent glow secondary to their glacially moving digestive processes. The glow, of course, had been fashioned to flatter faces better than a cinematographer aiming cameras and superstars past their prime. By comparison, the ordinarily cajoling incandescent bulbs of this world seemed downright harsh.
While it may be true that Singularity was less defined by whatever cocktail of technologies existed at any given moment than by the fact that you were trapped in a non-ending explosion of creativity, where more technological breakthroughs were coming on line at one moment than any unupgraded human nervous system could process, clearly the cocktail itself did matter.
The little things mattered.
She pointed to the windows facing the city.
“Whoa!” Torin exclaimed. “The entire city is covered with greenery. Very eco-friendly, I must say.”
“You’d think they’d have come up with biolum bulbs, which suddenly seem so much more out of place on our world.”
Torin shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. On our world they can feel one another’s distress and communicate like Telegraph Vines. But on a world such as this, all those interlinked biolum bulbs might well form a group mind more powerful than any other, and more prone to correct any imbalances between humans and the biosphere to the benefit of the biosphere.”
“I’m digging the nature theme in any case. My flat back on my home world would work even better here, might be less of a defensive stronghold at that, with me held up in it like a princess trapped in her Eifel tower.”
She returned her attention to the precinct proper, and was getting quite comfortable settling into the many picayune differences of this timeline when she found herself pushed rather rudely out of her comfort zone yet again.
“Holy shit!” Torin exclaimed. Right before their eyes Clyde Barker and his young female apprentice manifested out of nowhere. The little girl held up her right hand and sent Torin’s and Kendra’s doppelgangers flying into the wall so hard they registered as Jackson Pollock paintings by the time they made contact.
“Oh my God!” Kendra exclaimed. “I finally find a primitive backwater I don’t mind hanging out in, and this is what they do to me! How am I going to talk those two into swapping realities with us now?”
“Come on,” Torin said, “we need to grab hold of Clyde and his protégé before they disappear again.” Torin clutched Kendra by the arm and dragged her out of the room when he realized she was still too shocked to react, the cheeky humor an ineffective Band-Aid to how she actually felt.
Still holding on to Kendra, Torin managed to grip Clyde Barker’s wrist just as he and the little girl were beaming out of there.
The foursome materialized in a basement of some old home. It was unfinished, its ceiling relatively high. The air cold and damp to the point that even Torin’s ethereal body was getting the shivers. Technically he shouldn’t have been corporeal enough to feel anything. The unmortared r
iver stone walls made the house overhead feel like it might come crashing down on their heads at any moment.
“I still don’t understand why we have to live down here like rats,” the young girl said.
“I told you, Notchka, this world is more psychically impressionable than most. Until we learn to control our minds better it’s for our safety. The earth acts as a shield.”
“That house upstairs, not so much,” Notchka said, staring up at the ceiling and the footsteps she was hearing.
“Why don’t you go and investigate? I have too much work to do.”
“You always have too much work to do,” Notchka complained.
“And who’s more qualified to deal with any intruders our thoughts might have magnetized to us?”
“I am.”
“That’s right, you are. So don’t keep me from my work any longer.”
The young girl plodded up the stairs. “You go after her,” Torin said. “I’ll stay with Clyde.”
Kendra heard the creaking floorboards overhead, and drew her gun. “Yeah, I guess, of the two of us, I’m more qualified to handle what’s up there as well. Psychically impressionable, huh? Let’s hope that means the bad guys die from ghost bullets as readily as they do the real ones.”
“Yeah, well, I’m beginning to think my knowledge of quantum physics isn’t the only thing that landed us here. I am one of the more psychically impressionable ones from our timeline.”
“We can discuss the finer points of this timeline shifting gig when I get back. If I get back.” She ran up the stairs to catch up with the little girl.
With half of their landing party audible overhead, along with the intruder, Torin turned his attention to Clyde. “What are you up to, my scientific friend?”
He leaned in as Clyde took his eyes away from the microscope to jot down some notes. When Torin pulled his own face away from the eyeglass, he had no doubt his expression was a mask of dread.
Time Bandits Page 11
