“Since when do we have transporter technology?” Torin asked. “I’m a tech newshound; there’s no way that one would have slipped by me.”
“The Planetary AI invented it a few seconds ago. Unlike you humans, She doesn’t have the luxury of fighting an interplanetary war at the limited hundred meters per second transfer speed of the neurons in your brain.”
“Why didn’t She invent it before?” Torin protested.
“And wipe out the entire transportation sector of the economy?” Davenport said. “She’s about winning supporters, not alienating people wholesale. Trust me, when this little interplanetary war blows over, if it blows over, She’ll conveniently forget She ever knew about it.”
“Nice to know She isn’t beyond a certain degree of politics,” Torin said.
“Apparently She knows when to put an end to the banter too.” Kendra noticed they were dematerializing. Already more ghost than solid form, her voice barely crossed the chasm of comparatively denser air separating her larynx from Torin’s eardrums.
THIRTY-NINE
“What are you two New Age fruitcakes doing here?” Misha said, getting a load of Kendra and Torin beaming in beside him in the spaceship hangar, only seconds after he’d finished solidifying.
“He’s the New Age fruitcake,” Kendra said, pointing to Torin. “I’m the chick in the knee-high leathers who used to whip you into submission back when we dated.”
“Oh, yeah. Thanks for that image. I could use something to settle my nerves.” He was staring at the bizarre alien-looking plant life taking over the hangar. They responded to the glowing lights in the hangar better than they did the weak sunlight coming from above. Hence, they twisted in directions away from the sun, which contributed to their alien vibe, that and the “hair of the dog” bark on trees and vines alike. Torin doubted that local area A.I. and the Vegetation City motif that many urban and rural areas had gone with was to blame for neglecting the site, which appeared abandoned and left over from some former age. Just the opposite. The equally bizarre looking seedpods which looked big enough to be birthing human clones were no doubt specialized for amplifying the scientists’ mind power, so they could better hack the Area 51 technology. That and possibly the fruits were juiced with endorphins to ensure the scientists’ anxieties when confronting the alien technology didn’t get out of hand, the planet’s tendency to psychically amplify their thoughts creating runaway effects.
Torin’s long straight black hair draping over his shoulders was doing nothing to attract the plants, and his bohemian look in general seemed to fit the throwback aura of the place. But Kendra’s alternating long flowing yellow and purple curls, catching the light from above, were actually drawing the plants. The metallic sheen of her hair able to amplify the light. The ivy inching toward her made the hangar all the creepier. No pun intended.
Torin grimaced at Misha’s lewd remark, trying to ignore Kendra and Misha both, as well as the surroundings, and take in the alien ship instead. It just seemed to be hovering there, caught in some kind of anti-gravity field.
He glanced down at the floor to see if perhaps the trick was the same as with his own spaceships back at home, the levitation in fact done by repelling magnets. But there was no metal on the floor, just cement. While that didn’t mean the cement wasn’t some special kind of ferro-cement, or wasn’t undergirded by magnetized metal plates, he doubted it.
There was a faint hum coming from the ship suggesting that some kind of onboard motor was responsible for this. Also the cells in his body seemed to be complaining; it wasn’t the natural-high effect one got from being near magnets courtesy of the negatively charged ions in the air. He ended up whistling at the same time as Misha, though Misha was whistling at Kendra. “Girl, you are quite the vision,” Misha and Torin said, Torin referring to the spaceship, as he caressed her, Misha referring to Kendra, as he brushed his hand across her face, which she pushed away.
“You have to admit, this is pretty cool,” Misha said, shifting his attention to the ship. The alien vessel had the same muscularity and chiseled features that Misha had in human form, so Torin wasn’t surprised to find him taking to it; if he were to die and come back as a spaceship, it’d be this one.
“Yeah,” Kendra admitted, taking the ship in. “Kind of grateful now I have such a messiah complex, courtesy of my defective parenting, that I just need to save the whole world.”
“Seriously? That’s why you’re here?” Misha said. “I’m still trying to figure that one out myself. I mean I do have some epic anger issues, but playing video game shootouts with alien spaceships as a stand in for the real thing never quite did it for me. I’m more of a fist-to-face kind of guy.”
“There may be only one way for any of us to know why we’re really here,” Torin said, “and that’s to let the drama play out.” He was standing smack dab center of the ship now, looking up at it, when he found a circle opening above him, very much like the iris of a camera lens, and himself being levitated on board.
Kendra gasped. Misha stared stone faced, eyes not blinking, refusing to let his sense of alarm show through. Not that the façade was doing much to hide the truth. Torin just had a big smile on his face.
Misha gestured, “Ladies first. Especially dominatrices.”
Kendra ignored the smartass remark, but responded to the invitation to enter the spaceship next, stepping ahead of them. Seconds later Misha followed.
***
“Dad?” Kendra said.
“Why do you sound so surprised?” her father asked, a half smoked joint dangling off his lips, suspended by gluey spit, as he talked. The man must have conditioned his body’s saliva over the years to have just the right joint-holding capacity.
“You’re a grease mechanic.”
“I can doctor any engine back to life, little girl, which is why the Planetary AI beamed me over here along with the rest of you. Granted, she needed to download the schematics and everything else she could figure out about the alien vessel to my puny brain, but she couldn’t give me the inherent aptitude. Not yet, anyway. God knows, with her next upgrade she’ll be able to do that too. Shame, all this change, and where has it gotten us? Not one more ounce of joy than can be derived from my stogie, that’s where.” He was studying the ship’s engine as he talked, opening the panel, exposing it, and getting a sense of it by passing his hands over the connections and fittings, almost like a psychic reader sensing through the palm chakra in his hand.
Kendra was beginning to get a sense for why she might have fallen for Torin, with his supreme multitasking ability; she’d gone for an idealized version of her father. That or she was just used to commanding only a small sliver of attention from the men she loved most, never all of it. If so, it might be something she could work on more constructively in her relationship with Torin now that she was more consciously aware of a possibly self-destructive pattern. Something to tackle in the next chapter of their lives, assuming they survived this one.
The shock of her father’s onboard presence defused, she turned her attention to the ship itself. They were packed in like sardines. Just thinking about getting in one another’s way during the combat ahead was enough for the ship to grow in size. Suddenly they had just enough room to feel cozy, proximate enough to act as a security blanket for one another, just not so proximate they were tripping over one another. Her father looked up from his work to regard the expanded digs. “Interesting. Whoever built this ship, took its space-warping abilities, which it no doubt used to get here, and applied it to other areas. Remind me to marvel about that later when time is a little less of the essence.”
Kendra wondered what the lifeform this thing was built for did come time to go to the bathroom. The rumination was enough to trigger more shapeshifting on the vessel’s part. Out came a toilet; instead of water in the bowl, there was a static noise, a sense of a field, that she wouldn’t be surprised to find out was some kind of disintegration field. “Someone needs to go to the bathroom,” her fathe
r said, absently, taking in the latest phenomenon without shifting his attention from his work on the engine. “Maybe we should stay focused on what we’re trying to do,” her father coached. “Though I wouldn’t expect the ship to be that cooperative with every little thought flitting through our minds.”
Kendra made a mental note that the psychic impressionability of their world, customarily dampened down by City and local area A.I.s, might have that dampening function suspended inside the ship. If so, that might have as much to do with the alien vessel’s responsiveness as its own programming.
Torin watched her father ripping at wires next, soldering and snipping in turn. “Anything I can help with?”
“Yeah, see if you can do that psychic voodoo that you do and find out what’s really ailing this ship. The Planetary AI isn’t too hopeful that my cauterizing old wounds is going to amount to much. Otherwise she’d have sicced droid repair bots on it long ago.”
“Yeah, I can do that, I guess,” Torin said, sounding less than confident as he began his sweep of the ship. He passed his eyes over every piece of it the way her father had passed his hand over the engine earlier, with equal parts lover’s caress and virgin curiosity.
“Come on, sweetheart,” Misha said to Kendra, settling into the co-pilot’s seat. “While I figure out how to work the weapons, why don’t you figure out how to navigate us out of here? Seem to remember you were pretty good at steering me to orgasms once upon a time.”
Torin rolled his eyes and shook his head and tried to ignore Misha, the same approach Kendra was taking.
As Misha tried the controls, hoping for a response and getting none, Kendra returned her attention to her father. “For what it’s worth, Dad, I’m happy to have you along. Maybe we finally hit on a formula for family togetherness.”
“I was just thinking the same thing. We’ll have to be reborn from here on out on a spaceship with me as the engineer and you as well, whatever, the Spock character from Star Trek perhaps, with all his nagging, ever-so-logical questions, so we have an excuse to be close together even if we’re still worlds apart.”
She smiled and said, “I’ll see what I can do with the guy upstairs.”
“You’re going awfully easy on me for once.”
“I’m guessing you two have been duking it out in enough parallel universes now that one of your copies is ready for a change,” Torin interjected.
Her father looked up from his engine tweaking. “Say what?”
“Ignore him,” Kendra said.
“No, no, I’m actually entirely onboard with that thinking. Just surprised to hear it coming out of someone else’s mouth.”
“Since when did you open your heart and mind to the multiverse?” Kendra asked.
“Pot is kind of like LSD, just takes a bit longer to achieve the same effects. Of course I was half under the impression I was losing my mind and dreaming all of those things. So all too happy to embrace the multiverse idea if it saves me my sanity.”
“You mean if it saves you from giving up pot,” Kendra said.
“Yeah, that too,” he said. “Think I got it that time.” He set down the visor and the laser pen, just two of the instruments he’d ferreted out of the engine compartment, built much like a machine shop toolbox. “See if we can kick-start this putt-putt, huh?”
“Especially since I can’t get any of the weapons to fire,” Misha said. “Everything must be linked to that motor. Just what kind of power house is that, anyway?”
“Black hole engine,” her father said. They all turned to give him a wary look. “Yeah, if I got the idle wrong, goodbye Earth. On the plus side, should solve our alien problem since it’ll likely take them out as well.”
“It’s still not starting,” Misha said, “assuming I’ve found the right buttons. I’d been concentrating earlier mostly on the firing mechanisms.”
“And what makes you such an expert on alien gunnery?” her father inquired.
“If you can fix any engine, doc, trust me, I can fire any weapon,” Misha replied, not taking his eyes off the control panel.
“It won’t start,” Torin said, “leastways, not without me. The ship requires a psychic link to be piloted, for any of its controls to respond at all. Whoever flew this thing once upon a time had a far bigger mind than I do. Not sure I have enough psychic power to get it to be all that compliant.”
Her father handed Torin what was left of his joint. “Sometimes you just have to lend a brother a hand.”
Torin looked at the joint skeptically before taking it in hand and taking a drag off of it. Making a pleased expression, he let out the trapped air in his lungs and said to Misha, “Try it now.”
Misha got the ship engine to turn over on the first try. “Well, navigator? I don’t have six hands. Something else the ship’s original cast member must have had going for him that we don’t.”
“Let Torin take the helm,” Kendra said. “He’s the multitasker. He can not only loop us all through to the ship to get it to respond to each of us, he can dialogue with me while I figure out why the hell the crime of the century is happening on my watch. I may have been drawn to this case because of who I am, but I sure as hell didn’t change all of history just so I could rise to the top to become the world’s most preeminent human.”
“And why not?” her father said, lighting up another joint for himself. “It’s a make a wish universe, or so I’ve always said. Oh, I’m not saying you did it all on your own,” he added when she gave him a guarded look, “but with the planetary AI to liaison for you, tune in just this alternate reality versus all the others she’s calculating across in that quantum brain of Hers…”
“What you’re saying is actually quite disturbing,” Torin said. Having gotten a feel for the control panel, he navigated them out of the hangar and shot them into the upper atmosphere. He made the ship dart about like the curious flight patterns witnessed by UFO watchers from day one. “If that’s true, then there’s no separating fantasy from reality anymore. Basically the planetary AI has turned the entire multiverse into one big video game to play and engage with on any level for each of us.”
“Which is very Zen when you think of it,” her father said. “We’re each the center of the universe, according to that mystical belief system.” They each threw a circumspect glance at him. “Oh, I’m not saying She’s doing it all on her own. But She’s probably interfacing with the other planetary AIs in this and other universes, any using quantum computing and taking advantage of non-locality, that is. With time there’ll be more of them interlinked, and that much more mind power to throw around to deal with people like us, rising up through the ranks, conditioned with each passing day to deal with more without becoming unglued.
“Once a mind is sufficiently shockproofed, it’ll not only likely be able to survive a tour of the multiverse, it’ll likely demand access to it in order to be all we can be. I mean how long you think video games are going to cut it when life itself can be played at that level? And not just for our satisfaction but for our deification? Isn’t that what Christ taught? The Gnostic version of Christ anyway. That we’re all children of God? That we’re all meant to evolve to his heights?” They all regarded him, speechless. “Sorry, smoke enough of this stuff, and I can get rather expansive.”
They could see the energy shield protecting the planet now that they were high enough into the stratosphere. It might have been invisible, but it phosphoresced nicely every time it was hit by the energy weapons of the attacking fleet.
“Are we going to be able to get through that shield?” Misha asked.
“Yeah, no problem,” Torin said. “Same technology that shields this ship, shields the planet. Looks like the planetary AI reverse engineered it from what she learned from this alien vessel.”
“It’s comforting to know that in my version of reality,” Kendra said, “that there is no HAARP installation doing this for us, hidden away in Alaska. Say one thing for me, I’m not a paranoid conspiracy whacko.”
> “I’m sure we’re all quite relieved, sweetheart,” Misha said, “but we have more to contend with now than your personal inadequacies. Taking over the flight controls, if you don’t mind,” Misha added with a sideways glance to Torin.
“Yeah, sure.” Torin took his hands away from the control panel. “He does seem to have a flair for this,” he said, as Misha shot them through the energy dome and into the battle arena, taking out two ships and maneuvering out of the way of the return fire of two other vessels faster than a fleeting memory.
Kendra noticed that he was actually out-flying the two autopiloted ships the Planetary AI was fielding. So much so that She was beginning to add his maneuvers to her repertoire to magnify the effects Misha was having.
“Torin?” Kendra said. “Any idea why they’re attacking us?”
“Yeah, the transdimensional entity which once flew this ship is still aboard, alive and well. It’s his psychic power that’s doing most of the heavy lifting and now that he’s linked his mind with me I can see quite a lot.”
“You just can’t get to the point any faster,” Kendra said. She’d taken to holding on to the overhead ceiling as if she were riding the muni train, rocking back and forth with the hits they were taking from the other ships, the ones Misha either couldn’t dodge or ignored in his suicidal attack approaches.
“Sorry,” Torin said. “They’re a terrorist force. They’re not interested in attacking the Earth, just destroying the planetary AI. They couldn’t manage it on their world because their planetary AI is a good deal more evolved. They thought they’d take out the other planetary AIs, the more fledgling ones, hoping to weaken their planetary AI that way so She at least couldn’t link up with the others.”
“Seems not everyone is keen on living in a post-Singularity world,” Kendra remarked.
“Well, we’re not at Singularity yet,” her father corrected her. “But getting damn close now that we’re in an Age of Abundance.” He took another toke on his joint to help cushion him from both revelations, the one he’d just made, and the one Torin had just made by way of the transdimensional lifeform on board their vessel.
Time Bandits Page 36
