“Megalomaniac international terrorist?” Kendra asked.
Ashton and Angelica shook their heads. “We don’t think so,” Ashton said. “Took the planetary AI to do the necessary atmospheric and weather science. Anyone working even a layer or two down with all the networked supercomputing power in the world wasn’t going to have the brain power they needed to pull it off.”
“Can She shut off the chain reaction once it starts?” Kendra asked.
Both women shook their heads. “She’s working on the countermeasures, but it’s why she bothered to inform us at all. Humans will need to intercede or She will have to take more drastic measures.”
“Droids sent after anyone piloting the airships to kill the pilots and/or destroy their ships,” Torin said, filling in the blanks.
“I’ll write an algorithm,” Davenport said, “that’ll take the airship race across a wider swath of populated areas of the globe, and at a lower altitude where they’re even more visible. Better advertisement for all concerned parties, zero chances of ozone layer destruction. The race course can even be modified on the fly as advertisers bid to get in on the action to broadcast their digital big screen commercials on the surface of those airships. I’ll make sure there’s even less chance of in-air collisions so the airports sign off on it.”
“What about the no-fly zones?” Kendra said.
“The algorithm will negotiate with the City AIs for clearance. The City AIs will decide from the panoply of variables only they can calculate what restrictions apply.”
Torin shook his head slowly. “What’s got you looking so bent out of shape?” Kendra asked him.
“You two are the death of fiction, that’s what. How am I supposed to write our life story when you keep prematurely ending the dramatic race against the clock to keep the bad guys from blowing up the world?”
“Come on, big guy,” Kendra said, grabbing her coat. “I think I have a solution to that one.”
“Good, because if the Age of Abundance economy is just as ably described as the End Days economy, I’d think I could eke some sense of drama out of it,” Torin whined.
“Wait, hold up,” he said, grabbing her arm. “We might want to hold off leaving a while longer.” She followed his eyes to where the office was morphing into a bullet train station.
“Looks like one of my detectives forgot to collar one of his perps,” Kendra said. “Smart of him to morph the place into a getaway platform for him. Easy enough to get lost like a needle in a haystack of departing passengers.”
“How could someone forget to use a dampening collar?” Torin couldn’t keep the indignation out of his voice.
“The plants throughout the city excrete pheromones anymore to dampen down the psychic impressionability of the residents, and of the vicinity to the residents themselves.”
Torin nodded. “Thus relieving the City AI from having to run interference between urbanites who don’t get along. You’re suggesting that our detectives are getting so used to a dampened down reality that they occasionally forget to use he collars in the police station? Just in case one of the perps has developed some workarounds to the psychic dampening that only the collars can neutralize?”
She shrugged. “It’s a theory.”
“I hear the City AI is no longer dialoguing with just the human archetypical group mind via our dreams anymore, but with the biosphere, to elicit greater cooperation among all players. So, what, the house plants counteract the neurohormones, restoring the impressionability of the environment to the resident? So that in the privacy of our own homes we can know a greater sense of freedom?”
Kendra shot him a strange look. “You have to ask? You don’t notice the difference when you’re home?”
Torin shrugged. “I’m usually too busy testing the latest plants, animals, and compounds that take advantage of our impressionability in one way or another. The house pets, for instance, that coax you into a Dr. Do Little world of talking and dancing and having formal dinners with the animals. A lot of people lack the neurochemicals to procure certain kinds of fantasy worlds, so while their ability to affect the environment isn’t diminished, their options are still narrowed. So my home environment stays pretty neutral so as not to interfere with the tests.”
“I keep forgetting you’re heir to a multi-trillion dollar corporation, Greenpeace.”
“Still can’t believe we took over that name from the save-the-whale people. That was so wrong.”
The train station morphed back into their more familiar police station. “I guess that means the perp either got away, or my detective got the collar on him.”
“You ready yet for me to inject more classic storytelling into the tale of your life?” Torin asked. “You know, with a proper amount of racing against the clock to stop the bad guys from blowing up the world at the last possible second?”
“The story of my life could do with a little less ADHD, for that matter,” he quipped, doffing his hat. “An Age of Abundance is a bitch for staying on track with all the distractions of new inventions popping up daily, and how they change the nature of reality, or for even remembering what the hell the story of my life is even about.”
“Definitely have the antidote for that one,” she said, smirking at him.
FORTY-ONE
“You bought us to a smart-drink bar?” Torin gazed about the establishment with a wry smile threatening to erase his scorn of condescension. The bartender before them was more of a whole foods juicer than anything else. Customers picked from which fruits were growing on the vines crawling about the club they wanted to sample, brought them to the barkeep, and she pureed them in her blender for them. Physicists needed a different blend than medical researchers who wanted nothing to do with the fruits that artists thrived on. Even cosmological physicists needed a different tweak than the solid state physicists. They were assisted in their decisions by the menu selections, available at the bar. Pre-picked fruit was already behind the counter ready to go. The less potent fruits, still green and hanging over head, were more for the newbies.
“He’ll take the concoction for psychics, and I’ll take the one for detectives,” Kendra said, ordering. The bartender towered over both of them by nearly a foot, and had more exposed musculature in her skimpy black leather outfit than Torin had buried under his clothing.
“You realize the City AI who comes up with these things tests the concoctions entirely in simulation mode,” Torin balked and barked into her ear over the din coming from the rest of the bar. “Meaning these are all human guinea pigs undergoing first generation human trials. As if our fate weren’t drawn into question on a good day.”
She yelled back at him over the sound of the blenders in the barkeep’s hands set to high puree as she worked on fulfilling their requests. “You’ll appreciate why I brought you here in a minute, if you can keep your disdain in check just a moment longer.”
He made a sour face, but sipped his drink when the Amazon of a bartender served it to him in a pitcher of a glass. Then he made a happy face. “Not bad, even if it is probably pickling my brain, and not in a good way.”
Kendra took her glass and walked them over to the edge of the bar. As they took their seats, Torin said, “Just how much into this drink do I have to be before you spill the beans?”
“You decide. I brought you here to tell you we’re going after Clyde and Notchka.”
“I thought we decided they were off limits because to chase after them would just be feeding into their little drama. And in a co-created universe, you have to be careful what dramas you feed into, or risk remaining a victim forever. And we had both had enough of being victims after our parents.” Torin’s usually sharp eyes took on even more of a razor’s edge. “Or did we decide not to go after them until the hurt inner child in ourselves was healed? Healed enough, anyway, to free up the mind power necessary to close the net on them? Honestly, our thinking on the matter is a bit convoluted to keep track of even in this heightened state.”
&n
bsp; He studied his drink, rotating the glass in his hand held out in front of him. He was seeing faces popping up at him out of the swirls of pulp and different colored juices in the glass that refused to blend. Kendra knew, because she was seeing them too. “God, this stuff really is potent. The right brain with all its pattern identification abilities just kicked into high gear.”
Torin set down the chalice. “Oh wait, I remember now, we decided not to chase after them because once the hurt inner child in ourselves was healed, Clyde would disappear altogether, because he was just a boogey man conjured by our most repressed fears in this make-a-wish universe.”
Kendra groaned. “God, please tell me we’re not that hopeless.” She buried her face in her hands and hid her face briefly behind a curtain of hair.
When she popped her head up again, she took another sip of her smart drink to check her thinking, and said, “Well, I decided, whatever reason we had for not chasing after him was a load of crap.”
“Of course it was. The only thing you fear worse than Clyde Barker, who is the epitome of the intimidating father figure, by the way, is technology more advanced than you can deal with, which couldn’t possibly be better epitomized than in that little girl Notchka. If you needed to lie to yourself as to why you weren’t ready for a showdown with either, who was I to stand in your way?”
“Don’t point your made-wisen-on-smart-juice little finger at me.”
“I’m not pointing it at you, I’m swirling it at you. I’m using it like a magic wand, hoping to make your hair sparkle more than your eyes. Because your eyes are becoming damned distracting.”
She ignored his sexual innuendo. “You were only too happy to drop the case because you’d much rather return to playing in wonderland. And don’t pretend an Age of Abundance isn’t your wonderland. Every hi-tech crime for you is just a present to open. And when you get bored with your new toy, you’re only too happy to move on. Who cares if the case is solved or not, or what hapless pair of detectives we have to dump it on?”
He frowned at his half-empty mug. “Remind me never to drink this again. I should be handling this truth-shall-set-you-free crap better than you, and I’m just not.”
“We’re going after Clyde and Notchka because we’re the only ones who can!”
“Bullshit. That’s our messiah complex rising to the surface again. Reason number whatever for not chasing after Clyde and Notchka.”
Kendra was beginning to wonder if the sharper eyes weren’t just seeing better into his stockpile of memories. Perhaps they were observing the different ways they’d concocted to dodge the bullet in other timelines as well. “Nope, not our messiah complex,” she insisted. “It’s the truth. Look at us. Look at where we are.” She held out her hand, palm up and open and materialized a miniature elf, looking sleek and sexy and coquettish enough in her body language to easily mesmerize Torin.
“I’m sorry. What were we talking about?”
Kendra made the elf disappear. “We’re on a Ley-line-adjacent world. Empowering our minds. So much so it takes city AIs networked with one another and with area AIs until they form a planetary AI. All with the aim of dampening down human psychic abilities, just to keep this from turning into a Buddhist hell world full of super-powered monsters of the ID duking it out with one another in living Technicolor.”
“Ah, I remember now. That was reason number whatever plus one why we couldn’t follow Clyde and Notchka. The universe they were opening already exists as a Buddhist hell realm. And therefore the only gateway he was opening was to one of them, and couldn’t possibly affect us, we enlightened souls who want nothing to do with it.”
She felt the sudden tension in her forehead as her eyebrows went up. “Really? And where do you think elf lady comes from?” She materialized the elf for him again.
“Oh shit! The psychic dampeners throughout the city should make that impossible.”
She grabbed his chin and craned his head toward the rising din at the center of the bar. A cockfight had broken out. The pit was surrounded by gamblers. Only those weren’t cocks fighting. They were alien creatures not of this world, far deadlier looking than anything homegrown. They sported exoskeletons instead of wearing their bones on the inside. One looked like it might have evolved from a lobster, the other from a snake. The gamblers betting were manifesting gold bullion, priceless art, whatever came to mind out of the void.
“Oh, that’s not good,” Torin said. “I suppose it is time to rethink ignoring Clyde Barker and his wunderkind sidekick.” He turned back to face Kendra. “But what of our crippling self-doubts and anxieties? I have a lot invested in being the eternal child, you in being Miss Malcontent, or should I say, Lady Luddite?”
“If one thing rescuing the moon from alien miners taught me, it was that we can face our worst fears and come out on top, even if we’re not a hundred percent. Just five minutes with my father, and a good chunk of those crippling fears fell away, enough for us to send the aliens packing.”
“Yeah, well, according to him you had a lot of help from versions of yourself in parallel timelines doing a lot of the heavy lifting in healing your relationship.”
“Whatever. Stop sidestepping the issue.”
Torin sighed. “I should be proud of you instead of feeling all whipped.”
“Why?”
“I’m the one usually coming up with the big breakthroughs and insights in our investigations. It’s all you can do to ride my coattails.”
“And you pick now to rub my nose in it?”
“I pick now to draw your attention to the fact that our crazy, hippy-dippy, New Age ideas about self-betterment and opening a better channel to our higher selves—by whatever means—weren’t totally misguided. Look at you. You liberate just a little of your psychic energy trapped in your unconscious, forever doing war with your father, and there she is, the woman who should have been leading these investigations all along. Suddenly it’s me trying to follow in the wake of your coattails.”
She smiled at him. “That’s sweet of you.”
“Actually that’s me being slightly bitter and jealous. I’ll get around to being sweet when I’m done licking my wounds and dealing with the insecurities of no longer being indispensable in this duo.”
She widened her smile. “You’ll always be indispensable to me.”
He returned his eyes to the cockfight. “All right, enough of this. I suppose this is where we take advantage of this ironic twist of fate to beam ourselves out of here straight at Clyde and Notchka, using the very same power of mind we didn’t have a moment ago, and that we couldn’t have had without their help.”
“Not quite. First we kidnap Notchka.”
Torin returned his gaze to her. Decided now was a good time to finish the rest of his drink. Slammed it down. “Come again?”
“What, you think we’re going to talk Clyde down with our penetrating insights into the nature of reality? No, we’re going in there with guns blazing. And the only thing able to stand up to Bad Notchka is going to be good Notchka.”
He nodded and said, “who we’re going to have to create by stealing her away from one of the other timelines, adopting her and raising her properly, instead of under the influence of creepy Clyde. But that’s going to take more time than we have. By then it’ll be way too late to reverse the effects of what he’s set in motion.”
“You forget that we’re in a unique advantage to turn negatives into positives.”
Torin reached into his psychic self again to decode her latest cryptic remark. “You want us to backfill her childhood with us by broadcasting fake memories into her mind, using our amped up psychic abilities. Sort of like those training films they want us to take so we can act the role of SWAT when we need to, saving the department the money of hiring a separate team of trained soldiers.”
“We may not be at one hundred percent, but we’re at least at fifty-percent. Because your intuitive brain is linking up with my rational brain just fine, and together we make a whol
e person, even if individually we have a ways to go.”
“So how do you suggest we go about making these fake memories?”
She grabbed hold of him and they held hands over the table as she closed her eyes. She obviously planned to link up with him using their enhanced psychic abilities to read each other’s minds and co-create the memories together. She opened her eyes again to glare at the cockfight when the rising din got the better of her. “You mind? We’re trying to have a moment here!”
She closed her eyes again.
A few minutes later, they opened their eyes and a fourteen year old Notchka was sitting in the booth with them, right beside Kendra. “That was nice what you just did,” Notchka said.
Kendra and Torin sported shocked smiles. “We thought we’d have to come get you and download the memories to you,” Kendra said.
“You forget, my mind reaches across time and space.”
“But which Notchka did we get?” Torin asked.
“The one that was most susceptible to your rhetoric. All the versions of me in all the parallel universes have our second thoughts about Clyde. Of us all, I was the one most ready to get off the fence.”
“Then you know what we have to do?” Kendra said.
Torin cleared his throat. “It’s a hell of a thing to ask a child to do. In fact it constitutes a form of child abuse all of itself.”
“I know,” Notchka said. “But it’s a necessary evil. Like I thought Clyde was, once upon a time.”
“We can’t guarantee that you’ll survive this showdown,” Kendra said. “That any of us will survive.”
“No, you can’t. But it’s the right thing to do. You gave me back my childhood. Now, let me do the same for you, and for all humanity in all timelines. Not everyone has a hurt inner child, but for all the ones that do, they deserve a chance to work it out by their own methods.”
Time Bandits Page 38
