“So how do we stop this guy?” Kendra asked.
“Haven’t a clue,” Torin said.
NINETEEN
“I might, have a clue, I mean.” Davenport ran over to his desk area. He reached into a bottom drawer and pulled out a box of slides. Then he mounted a slide projector, yanked out of the same drawer, on his desk, aimed at the wall.
“What’s he doing?” Kendra asked.
“It’s a slide projector. One from the 1950s, it looks like,” Torin explained.
“Sorry, but when things get too stressful, I find it helps to have a little bit of home with me.” Davenport turned the lamp on in the projector and mounted the first slide. “A psychic drew these up. Kardassian.”
Torin made a whistling sound with his lips.
“That’s his ‘I’m impressed’ whistle,” Kendra explained. “He’s got one for every mood and emotion. I had to give away the canaries because between the two of them it was just too much.”
“Kardassian is like the Taoist who went into a meditative trance thousands of years ago,” Torin explained, “and when he came out of it, gave us acupuncture, the mapping of the body’s energy meridians, and a New Age form of science—according to you—that has stood up throughout the eons. The last time he released something over the internet, he brought down every major crime syndicate across the globe, with nothing more than mathematics.”
“Yeah, I remember that,” Kendra said. “Didn’t he have to go into hiding?”
“No one’s been able to find him since,” Torin said.
“If you two will stop upstaging me long enough, I’ll explain what this is.”
“No need, I read your mind,” Torin said.
“No, you did not! While you were arguing with her? You’re so the man. But you will not rob me of my moment, damn you.”
“Fine, you bring princess here up to speed on the hard, brutal facts. I have work to do now that you’ve pointed me in the right direction.”
“What direction?” Kendra asked. “By the way, I hate it when I’m not the smartest person in the room and I’m not making connections two steps ahead of everyone else.”
“Must be tough to be you,” Torin and Davenport both said absently, the two lost in what they were doing. “Hey, did you just read my mind again?” Davenport said to Torin.
“No, that was just a bro-bonding moment.”
“Cool. Haven’t had one of those in a while,” Davenport said, “except with my genetically altered desk plant.” Kendra and Torin shifted focus to his desk plant. It was a miniature tree whose swirling, intertwined trunks flexed and shifted poses like a miniature Charles Atlas showing off his muscle-endowment for Davenport. “Sorry, another de-stresser.”
“I can’t believe all this time I never noticed,” Kendra and Torin said over one another.
“Get out of my head!” Kendra shouted at Torin.
“I’m not in your head! Why would I want to go into that dark place now that I’ve seen the light?”
Davenport laughed. “Good one. I bet you two can rub each other the wrong way like nobody else. I mean, what’s the point of being lovers if you can’t dress each other down in more than one way, huh?”
“Explain to me what you’ve latched on to,” Kendra said, ignoring both of them, looking as if she figured she’d been sucked into their vortex of their bro-bonding moment long enough.
“According to Kardassian, these star maps I’m projecting for you depict the energy meridians for the multiverse. Hey,” he said, turning to Chris, “You don’t think this guy is that Taoist master you talked about, reborn do you?”
“He might be. Of course, I’ll believe anything if it’s mind-blowing enough. Just like Kendra will ignore anything that threatens to fry her circuitry.”
“Yes, Davenport, so you might want to take advantage of this window of opportunity before it expires,” Kendra interjected, the sour expression returning to her face. Actually, Davenport wasn’t sure if it had ever left.
“Well, I’m not the intuitive, Torin is, but if I had to hazard a guess,” Davenport explained, “I’d say Clyde Barker’s next stopping point is some place on one of these garden spot planets lying along the Ley lines. That way he can continue to magnify his influence over the heavens. Who knows how many planets he has to infect to get the overall effect to be irreversible, or just to accelerate it like wild fire? Am I right, or am I right, bro?”
“He’s right,” Torin said.
Kendra just shook her head and glowered. “It’s still no different than finding a needle in a haystack.”
“Unless…” Torin said teasingly, his fingers flying across the keyboard.
“Unless what?” she said with rising impatience and pitch in her voice.
“Unless you’re smart enough to send out a call to Kardassian to mathematically determine the flight course Clyde Barker took in order to minimize the worlds he’d have to infect to make his dastardly, brilliantly maniacal plan work.”
“I thought no one knew where this guy is,” Kendra protested.
“That doesn’t mean he doesn’t bother to tune in the real world to know which events are worth his while,” Torin said.
“Who says? Since he’s clearly got bigger fish to fry than what’s going on in our neck of the woods, at least going by these star maps.” Kendra folded her arms to bolster her steadfastness on the subject.
“Think of Kardassian as every bit the psychic I am,” Torin said, “only specialized. The ultimate specialist whereas I’m the ultimate generalist, relying on synthesizing scientific acumen across multiple disciplines, a sort of Jack of all trades.”
“Then why don’t you procure the math needed?” Kendra asked.
“Because like all Jack of all trades before me, past a certain point I really have to hand the problem over to someone like Kardassian.”
“What makes you think he’ll answer? And within any timeframe that’ll be any good to us?” Kendra said, watching Torin struggling to hammer out his S.O.S on his keyboard and shoot it over the internet in a way that would cause Kardassian to notice.
“Because I think if Clyde Barker is the key to all this massively propagating madness, Kardassian is the lock. I think he saw him coming before he got here. I think he’s been meditating on this guy his entire life. And I think we just stumbled onto the first breadcrumb he left us that will lead us on a trail to catching him and stopping him.”
“You’re lucky you have a reputation as being one of the world’s premiere psychics. Otherwise I’d have dismissed your fancy storytelling the way I throw any sloppily written novel to the side.” She turned to Davenport. “And what say you in all this?”
“Oh, I don’t think, I know.”
“Since when did you become psychic?”
“I can do our psychic one better. Behold the telekinetic wonder,” he said, pointing to the tablet floating towards him. It stopped inches from the threesome.
They heard panting as the latest invisible man materialized. “It’s the mathematically plotted shortest path to radicalizing the cosmos,” John said.
“Let me introduce, John,” Davenport said. “John Kardassian.”
Kendra upchucked the coffee she had swallowed from the mug she had pressed to her lips. Torin stood, looking all starry eyed and giddy with delight. He came closer and extended his hand to shake. Instead, Kardassian just handed him the tablet. Torin glanced down at the iPad. “Thank you. Now we have a real chance of nabbing him.” He glanced back at Kardassian. “But this can wait. How… how long have you been here?”
“Years.”
“Years?” Kendra said.
“Ever since Davenport reached out to me. I needed a safe place to hide. This seemed as good as any other, especially with the invisibility factored in. I was the one that hacked the City AI to allow for the doppelgangers so your detectives could minimize on being spread too thin.”
Kendra took a deep breath and let it out. “Yeah, well, something tells me they’re goi
ng to need some other coping mechanisms besides that if we’re going to catch Clyde Barker, even with your help.”
Torin bounced his eyes between Kardassian and Davenport, picking up on the innuendo lying beneath Davenport’s big grin. “What are you picking up on that I’m not?” Kendra said to Torin.
“Nothing. Nothing pertinent anyway.”
“You let me decide that.”
Davenport scratched the back of his neck. “She may as well know, bro,” he said to Torin. “John is my sex toy. Not too different than the inflatable kind.”
“Yes, that’s correct,” Kardassian said matter-of-factly. “When I’m in prolonged meditation, sometimes the surface stimulation helps to bring me back. His affections allow the astral traveler to return to his body.”
“You know what,” Kendra said. “Torin was right. I really didn’t need to know. And I have weirdness on a cosmic scale to contend with right now, leaving little or no room in my head to entertain weirdness at the interpersonal level.”
Davenport and Kardassian exchanged glances. “That was really bigoted,” Davenport said. “You should apologize for hurting our feelings. What, are you saying that one man’s kinky fetishistic needs to go down on a semi-comatose catatonic guy to avoid an even more embarrassing descent into necrophilia can’t be counterbalanced by one astral traveler’s needs to find home?” He looked at Kardassian. “Forgive her. She’s so provincial.”
Kendra just shook her head and shifted her focus to Torin. “Come on, let’s go home and have angry sex. It’s the only way we’ll ever sync up enough to know how to make the most of this treasure map he handed you.”
Torin practically leapt up from his chair, grabbing his trench coat and hat in one smooth motion. “Sorry, guys,” he said, apologizing to both Davenport and Kardassian. “Being stuck in the spirit world for as long as we were definitely had some drawbacks.”
Davenport gestured with his hand between Kendra and Torin. “See, this is what I mean. I can’t believe you can judge us like that only to be guilty yourself of the same behavior.” He glowered at Kendra. “Complete hypocrite.”
She smiled, softening at the revelation. “Fine, Davenport. I’m sorry.” She looked over at Kardassian. “I really mean it.”
But Kardassian was gone, astral traveling, perhaps trying to track down Clyde Barker in his own way. He was catatonic and unresponsive to this world, unblinking, his body gone rigid. But somehow still standing without help.
“Out of fear of what comes next,” Kendra said, “I think that really is our cue to exit.”
“No, hold on,” Torin said, grabbing her arm. “What better Geiger counter, I mean tracker, to take with us come time to chase after Clyde than an astral traveler who has dedicated his entire life to finding and stopping this guy?”
“No way, we’re not dragging along a civilian, especially one that can barely tie his shoes in one of his more lucid moments.”
“Maybe I can have John design some device that will allow me to tweet you the coordinates of Clyde’s next destination,” Davenport volunteered.
“Not a bad idea,” Torin said. “Best way to balance your sexual needs with saving the universe, anyway.”
“Trust me, that was a real bro-bonding moment right there, pal,” Davenport said.
Torin smiled and followed Kendra out the door, thinking, so close, yet so far. Even if Kardassian could keep them hot on the trail of Clyde Barker and his apprentice, it was going to take both Torin’s psychic sensitivity for reading people and Kendra’s detective acumen to really stop this guy. Even then, they’d seen what happened already to the ones who crossed that duo’s path. And they had no real antidote for that.
NEXUS TIMELINE
TWENTY
“It’s so Dr. Frankenstein, I love it,” Derringer said, staring at The Eye. Their cyber-and genetically enhanced clairvoyant, himself an early Clyde Barker prototype, was hooked up to a thicket of apparatuses, attached to his head, his body. He was literally cocooned in hi-tech hardware, all meant to amplify his psychic projections. He now filled a room big enough to park a small plane in.
“Any sign yet that Notchka is receiving his psychic pleas to return home,” General Mortimer Wrenfield asked, beholding the Eye alongside Derringer. “Some sign she’s responding to our rhetoric that we’re far better mentors for her than Clyde Barker. Leastways since he’s seen fit to take her off world. Prior to that stunt, I was all about letting him handle the parenting on his own.”
Electrical sparks started surging through the room. They were arcing wildly off of the apparatuses attached to The Eye. It was just a matter of time before they fried him. “Turn the damn thing off!” Mortimer shouted.
Technicians were slow to respond. Most had been tweaking the apparatus at the time of the spikes. They were constantly tweaking and bickering amongst themselves, like recording engineers trying to get the band to sound right on an equalizer. The ones not thrown completely clear of the machines were outright fried. The scientists picking themselves up off the floor were still trying to orient themselves to place and time.
Mortimer didn’t wait for them to respond. He ran to the master control lever and flipped it. But by then it was too late. The Eye looked like a barbecued potato wrapped in aluminum foil that had burst because it had been left in the pile of coals too long.
“You wanted to know if we’d caught any sign that Notchka had received our psychic communiqué,” Derringer said. He pointed to The Eye. “There’s your sign.”
TWENTY-ONE
“Do you believe this shit?” Monty said, guzzling his beer on the job, against union regs, against common sense, considering they were working the hundred fifty-seventh floor construction of an unfinished building, so naked that it was still just a stick house of steel girders slapped together. And the wind gusts alone could knock a sober man off his feet.
“They don’t even take a break,” Carl said, “that’s the freaky part.”
“That’s the freaky part! How about the fact that they don’t say a word? They never look at one another and yet they coordinate their movements better than the blasted Bolshoi ballet.”
They were both staring at the robots doing most of the building assembly from the riveting to the welding and the toting of the girders. Mostly they looked like crabs, or maybe spiders scurrying along. Like the whole building needed delousing.
“Why do they even keep us around, anyway?” Monty said, finishing his beer, crinkling the can in one hand, and tossing it at the nearest robot. The can bounced off the aluminum shell of the robot who acted as if oblivious to the insult.
“It’s the law. They gotta keep a certain amount of us working so people have money to shop for things once a year at Christmas. The whole economy turns now on the Christmas holidays. Then we go hibernate the other eleven months of the year like Polar Bears from Mars.”
“Speaking of which, I really need to get my Suspend-Pod serviced, or I’ll actually be awake those eleven months, eating piss on rye crackers, which I can scarcely afford. And what does that prove, except I’m even more stupid than the people who thought up this brainiac scheme to keep the middle class on life support?”
“It proves you can keep people subdued, off the streets and away from rioting, which just gums up business, if you give them some subsistence job for a couple months out of the year.”
“What do they do the rest of the year if they’re not rioting and they don’t go in for the Suspend-Pods?”
Carl grunted. “They hunt deer, raise chickens, barter on the black market, all that third world shit they do in Russia, only now they do it in America on account of we have corporations that are too smart to pay taxes and too evil to give back to the public good.”
“Fuck this shit. Get me another beer. I’ll show you what people really do to keep from rioting. They get blitzed out of their fucking minds, that’s what.”
“Yeah, no surprise they legalized every freaking drug you can think of. You want to make a pacif
ist who can stand on the sidelines through all this shit, be oblivious to all of it, you make him a drug addict first.” He slurped his own drug of choice. “You ought to try some of these energy drinks out of the vending machine, man. Perk you right up. You could cut off my leg right now, and I wouldn’t give a shit.”
Monty picked up a power socket-wrench. “I think it’s time to get radical on their ass. A couple fall to the street below, kill some people on the way down, maybe they’ll reconsider putting them up here.”
“You can’t get all racial, man.”
“Watch me.”
“It’s one thing to talk down about this crazy economy, but those robots have rights just like we do, you damn AI bigot.” Carl glared at Monty, standing as tall as the John Wayne hologram that greeted the Native Americans getting into the elevator with a big handshake and an even bigger grin at the foot of the construction site. Something about making up for all the racial shit in all those old westerns; Hollywood’s latest plan to win back market share from Bollywood which didn’t have quite so much racism and sexism to make up for in its movie career. The long thick ponytail braided down Monty’s back. The red skin like terra cotta clay. The plaid flannel shirt and jeans and cowboy boots. He just couldn’t see himself for the walking cultural cliché he was and all the dirty looks the high functioning AIs gave him for taking their jobs away from them. Carl, down to the brown skin, Mexican accent, and frijole breath, wasn’t about to rise above cultural clichés himself—forget that he was Indian also, just one of the tribes floating about the Mexican highlands—not without a little help, a little understanding, that Monty was doing his best to erode right now.
“Pity they didn’t leave me with better weapons, and pity they move better than I do,” Monty bitched, tapping the head of the socket wrench against the palm of his other hand menacingly. “This might take a while.”
“What are you talking about? You forget you can fly? And you can pull whatever weapons you want out of thin air?”
Time Bandits Page 16
