Time Bandits

by Dean C. Moore

  He shook his head at her with a playful, “ha-ha, very funny” expression on his face, before taking her hands in his. They both locked eyes and smiled, taking a moment’s reprieve from the cutting barbs he figured they used more for keeping them sharp than anything else. If their minds could respond quickly enough to make the jokes, then maybe they could respond quickly enough to stay on top of the criminals. One more no-doubt pitifully inadequate coping mechanism that Torin hadn’t bothered to take note of before. Maybe between them all…

  They both turned to look out the window at the street at the same time. “Oh my God!” she exclaimed as they witnessed the same phenomenon. Some guy beamed into the center of the street, or materialized there, someone for whom the autonavs piloting the cars trying to steer around the black ice couldn’t correct for in time; the vehicles smashed into him and into one another.

  The guy was wearing a one piece bodysuit, definitely standard superhero issue, or more likely, supervillain. He tossed the cars that were piling up in front of him out of the way and continued walking up the street, long enough to catch his bearings.

  “What do you think? Time bandit?” Kendra said.

  “I don’t know. What were you thinking before he materialized?”

  “That you were trying to prove you were some kind of superhero in bed.”

  “Ha-ha. Well, I’m not sure that’s enough for the synchronicity machine to kick in. The Universe may have a sense of humor, but I doubt it’s going to reward us just for that. Jokes are just how we get by, whether we’re following the wrong path or not.”

  “You don’t think Davenport sent us here deliberately, do you, because one of his algorithms gave the likelihood of a time bandit showing up here a high rating?”

  “He’s good, but he’s not that good.”

  “He could have been tracking us earlier at Make-Over. He did it before.”

  “He does have the hots for me. Well, that being the case, let’s go look into the guy in sculpted purple, shall we?” he said rising.

  “And skip out on that androgynous guy, chick, whatever? Right now she strikes me as scarier than this guy.”

  “Yeah, one more full-of-himself bad guy out to ruin the world, versus a plateful of chocolate croissants. I agree, he can take a number with all the rest.”

  Vogue Chick brought them their orders, a platter of chocolate croissants for Torin, with at least sixteen on the platter, and a coffee, black, in a standard restaurant white coffee mug that probably hadn’t changed shape or how it was made since the Stone Age. Kendra didn’t just do comforting, she did comforting in her own inimical style.

  TWENTY-SIX

  “You wanted to catch it on the news first, didn’t ya?” Davenport said, clicking the remote and freeze-framing the footage on their purple man who’d popped in at the proprietor’s Coffee and Books, and a Time to Remember. “I got you, just wanted to put that little extra distance on our culprit that seeing things play out on the big screen gives you. Nice way to blunt the shock. Out of curiosity, how many Present Shock coping mechanisms are you up to?”

  “How many are you up to?” Kendra asked defensively.

  “Don’t ask.”

  “So you were testing your algorithms when you sent us there?” Torin said. “And you already had them written before we arrived because you were playing fly on the wall with us when we visited Carl at the clinic? All this because you have the hots for me and you just can’t accept that I’m taken?”

  “You gotta admit, my stalking you has its upsides.”

  Torin knitted his brows, though in truth he wasn’t feeling particularly put out. And ogling Davenport wasn’t without its upsides either, as he was reminded regarding his latest hairdo. The swirls beat anything the vender could whip together at the soft-ice cream parlor. The lines in his five o’clock shadow, no less twisting and ornate, rivaled any hedge maze Torin had been fortunate enough to lose his way in at one point or another. The fact that Davenport didn’t look totally ridiculous, but actually managed to appear manly, as opposed to flaming, was the even greater design miracle. “Out of curiosity, did your algorithms pan out?”

  “You tell me, dude.” He hit play on the fifty-inch flat-screen monitor on Torin’s desk.

  The footage picked up pretty much from where Torin and Kendra had stopped watching from behind the window in the coffee shop. Purple Man, his mauve hair matching the electric purple sculpted body armor, his face no less chiseled than the contoured body suit, took a moment to get his bearings, then he found the building he was looking for. The skyscraper was sculpted in the fashion of a schooner’s sail, very Abu Dhabi.

  He ran and jumped onto its front facing side, leaned forward and slid up the side of the building as if gravity were above him, not below.

  When he got to the floor he wanted, he must have adjusted the superconductivity coefficient in the sole of his shoe to give him the necessary friction to brake, then he shoved his fist through the bulletproof glass. Bulletproof maybe, but not knuckle-proof to the Super Dude contingent.

  The cameras followed him inside the building. Davenport had many cameras to pick from in a city where they were virtually everywhere. But he didn’t rely just on the grid; he had a few mosquito-sized camera drones piggybacking on Purple Man. “I was really hoping to go with Purple People Eater,” Davenport said, “but so far, he just doesn’t seem to want to eat people. Maybe The Gay Flame, being as purple is such a gay color, but it’s not like he’ll give anyone a second look. This guy is nothing if not single minded.”

  Purple Man lumbered past shocked cubicle workers, and encroaching security, who he boxed out of the way, sending them flying into the walls on one punch so hard they remained lodged there. Bullets flying off of him, fired by the remaining security, that wised up and kept a healthy distance, just ricocheted into innocent cubicle workers, killing them, until the shooters had to desist with this approach as well.

  Finally, one of the security team raised his wrist to his mouth and whispered something into his com system. The cage doors dropped on the safe Purple Man was walking towards, each bar a cylindrical beam about six inches thick and stronger than steel. His progress to the safe barred, he pulled the cage bars out of the way as if he were pulling weeds. As for the next leg of his journey, he ignored the door closing behind him as he stepped into the safe.

  He checked around for the safe deposit box door he was looking for, decided to finesse this one better, just paused long enough to divine the combination, method of divination undetermined, then opened the door.

  Inside was some roughly cut stone that was glowing.

  The rock in hand, Purple Man faced the safe door, now closed on him and smiled, before disappearing the same way he’d come into this reality.

  “Okay, pause the footage,” Torin said. “First up, how did you know how to track this guy?”

  “The city AI is a quantum computing brain. There are quite a few quantum computers around these days, not all work the same. Mostly some are cobbled more than others. But at her level, you pretty much need a big brain, a really big brain. That’s why they allow her to do her quantum computing the way it was meant to be done, across parallel universes, so she can solve most any problem in real time. More to the point, so she can anticipate any problem ahead of time, and deploy the resources she needs. I asked her kindly if she wouldn’t mind looking ahead for time-space anomalies, fluctuations that might suggest a time traveler, a brief wormhole opening then closing. Advised her to ignore teleporters moving from one place to another on our world, who actually originated here, assuming we had any. Advised her, moreover, to predict which ones were the biggest threats and to notify us because we wanted to be deployed accordingly. Gave her the team’s credentials. So far she’s complying.”

  “Why, there have got to be people way more important than us and way higher up the food chain that would kill to get their hands on that information.”

  “Not really,” Davenport said. “They’re following
a don’t ask, don’t tell, policy, now that Singularity is in full effect, and no one can keep up. It’s pretty much crisis management after the fact, which, let’s face it, is pretty much all that government offices are good for. These days, private corporations as well. These rogue players, well, they’re like cancer cells. Until they metastasize to where entire organs of the body are affected, the body itself has bigger health crises to contend with.”

  “So why didn’t the city AI dispatch a militarized psychic force to contain him? Or at least evaluate the building he’s breaking into? And why wouldn’t she know about the glowing rock and its importance and the need to keep it safe from him?”

  Davenport glared at Kendra impatiently before catching himself. “I suppose this is my fault for building up the city AI so much. The fact is, she’s as overburdened as the rest of us. Her extrapolation engines are quickly exhausted playing guessing games with what invention, should it get into the wrong hands might…”

  “Yeah, alright, Davenport. I get it.” Kendra sighed and tried to regain focus. “So tell me, what did Purple Man want with the stone?” Kendra asked.

  “Apparently he needed it for his spaceship. He only gets so many teleporting jumps before his body is irrevocably damaged, so he’d just as soon not use any. But the ship can move through time and space as often as it likes.”

  “It’s Bizarrium, isn’t it?” Torin said, smiling.

  “How did you know? Never mind. I forget you have your own methods,” Davenport said. “Yeah, and that’s why this guy is America’s Most Wanted, at least as far as we’re concerned.”

  “Why’s that?” Kendra asked.

  “It’s speculated that a piece of Bizarrium that size,” Torin explained before Davenport could get the words out, “has enough stored energy to power the entire world for a good ten years out.”

  “Yes,” Davenport said, impatiently, his face spelling out that he didn’t appreciate having his moment stolen away from him, “and with the right containment device, not only can the nuclear fusion reaction be contained, but it can be sustained indefinitely. How you ask?”

  “Because of non-locality. The right containment device could allow it to consume additional Bizarrium linked to it across time and space, wherever it was.”

  “I’m guessing if I had my hands on a local stash of Bizarrium,” Kendra said, “and I found out someone was consuming it who wasn’t even in my universe, I might be a little pissed. Please tell me there are karma police stationed at all of these physics labs.”

  “There are, actually,” Davenport informed her. “Psychics whose job it is to think about things that more linear thinking folks are likely not to consider, things like that. Psychics like Torin, only more specialized, as an extension of their own abilities in solid state physics, in this case.”

  “Can the city AI, with a little prodding,” Kendra asked, “track Purple Man wherever he goes with that ship?”

  “You bet,” Davenport said. “Just say the word and we’re off of pause. Actually I’m kind of curious to see myself. Not because I’m into this sci-fi shit, but a good hotrod is a good hotrod. Take my 1950s BMW roadster…”

  “Thanks, Davenport,” Kendra said, her tone cutting him off more than her words. She looked up at Torin. “Sorry, but while I get that retrieving this Bizarrium could be a really big deal, who am I to say something isn’t coming along in five minutes that’s more suited to us?”

  Torin sighed. “There’s no way to know. That’s why we have to look for the signs. The synchronicities. Without them, we’re lost. Even the city AI is lost. Why do you think she’s so happy to cooperate with us? Bigger brains after a while just won’t do it. You’ve got to commune with the Universe directly.”

  “That’s a job for psychics like you, Torin, or maybe spiritualists.”

  “Even we need guidance to parse through all the options. Just because we’re psychically attuned to something, doesn’t mean that that’s what we should be glomming on to. Might be a part of our mind looking for attention we’d be best not to give it. It’s not like we’re any more in control of our own minds than the next person. Can’t risk the monsters of the Id leading us about by the nose with these psychic impressions.”

  “Ahhh!” Kendra screamed and put her hands up to her ears as if she couldn’t hear another word. “What you’re saying is my detective skills are useless as are your psychic skills. It’s not enough to balance out one another’s thinking.”

  “Yeah, if we want to do anything but spin our wheels, I guess so. We can just pursue cases your detective acumen or my psychic abilities points us towards, but that won’t make them the most important cases of the day, or even the cases that have the most to teach us about ourselves and the world around us.”

  “I don’t know about you, Torin, but I suck at this synchronicities game.”

  “Of course you do. We both do. That’s because we both want to face our worst fears like we want to jump into fire.”

  She had stormed over to the windows to settle her mind on the ever-morphing city of skyscrapers, no two floors in no two buildings rotating at the same speed or churning out the same shapes. “If that’s my cue to confront my father, save it.”

  “You may not have to, leastways not for a while.”

  She looked up at Torin with a flicker of hope in her eyes. “The tail can’t wag the dog,” Torin explained. “You’ve got to let your higher-self lead you to the next clue. That’s a lot more like the walking meditative state of hatha yogis. You have to learn to walk around in this altered state where you’re highly impressionable, but only to your higher self, not to all the distracting stimuli bombarding us each day and causing us to forget that all that glitters is not gold.”

  She shook her head slowly. “As daunting of an idea as that is, I have to admit, I could use a crutch, one that really works now that the rest of my coping mechanisms have been shot to hell.” She grabbed her trench coat. “And for your information, big guy, I got this flexible by doing yoga, and I’m not a newbie to meditation. Ever since reading Eat, Pray, Love, I’ve been modeling my life accordingly. Only, I travel as part of my investigations. And I eat divinely on account of you’re such a good cook and seem to refuse to eat anywhere that isn’t a five star eatery.”

  “And you meditate every day?” Torin asked suspiciously.

  “Yes. Why is that so hard to believe?”

  “I don’t think it’s so hard to believe. But I’m guessing you’ve been doing it to void your mind of thought impressions of any kind. Kind of as a sensory deprivation tank you can take with you anywhere.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  Davenport, looking increasingly uncomfortable the whole time they were jabbering, was tiptoeing away. “Stay right there, Davenport,” she said.

  “Ah, I’m still a good enough detective to know when to make myself scarce. Besides, if I catch your marital spat now, I won’t have anything to watch on the tele later. I like to schedule the highpoints of my day rather than have them hit me whenever, if you don’t mind.”

  “Fine, get lost, Davenport. I suppose subjecting you to this is cruel and unusual punishment, which you haven’t exactly earned.” Kendra parted her hair waiting for the next blast, her eyes locked on Torin.

  “I’m just saying that is only half of insight meditation. The least important half. You’re supposed to relax your mind to let in whatever thoughts want to intrude, intrude. Then you examine them from the cool, detached place that the meditative state allows, and then let them dissipate on their own. If you don’t do both sides of the coin together, you can’t get out of beta brainwaves long enough to lock in the brainwave patterns you need to perceive synchronicities better.”

  “Fine. I’ll make sure to do that. Happy?” she said, sounding angry, hurt, and defensive.

  “Good. I think once you do, you’ll find you’re much better at this synchronicity game.”

  “And what’s keeping you from following your own advice?”

  �
�Why, you of course. Rescuing you from yourself is such a fulltime job I have all the excuse in the world to ignore my own issues.”

  “Aren’t we the pair?” they said in harmony. He grabbed his trench coat.

  “Mad, angry sex?” she said.

  “I was thinking more like mad, angry side-by-side meditation, me trying to upstage you. After the mad, angry sex I mean. No reason to make things any harder on ourselves when it comes to letting go of our own bullshit.”

  “You should have been a hostage negotiator.”

  When they got home the only thing separating the mad, angry sex from the hot, passionate sex was the degree of noise. Pots and pans rattling and slamming against kitchen tile as they did their number on the butcher block table, oblivious to the hanging pots and pans, which led to their unseating. Plates landing and crashing into a million pieces. Loud yelps and cries piercing the intervening silence owing to Torin deliberately forgetting to be gentle and patient with his entries and exits.

  The neighbors must have caught on something was up, even past the soundproofed walls because when they looked up an hour or so later, they were surrounded by police, all holding their guns out, though lowered to the floor so as not to block the view or accidentally discharge.

  When they both stopped what they were doing to stare, one of the cops said, “Sorry, we weren’t sure whether we should leave you in case things took a turn for the worse.”

  Torin glanced down at their crotches. “Or until your hard-ons went down.”

  “Yeah, that too,” the cop said.

  “I think you can go now. It’s out of our systems,” Kendra said.

  The cops backed away without turning away. God forbid they curtail the view of the nakedness sooner than necessary.

  A couple hours later, about all Torin and Kendra were getting for their meditative efforts were stiff butts from sitting on the floor in cross-legged positions with their spines upright. “Anything?” she said.

  “No. You?”

  “Status quo from the last ten times I asked. What are we doing wrong?”