Time Bandits

by Dean C. Moore

  Torin smiled. “We’re off to see the wizard then.”

  Notchka held out her hands to the two of them. They knew what taking her hand meant. They were about to go on one hell of a ride.

  They clutched her hands and closed their eyes. It was all the defense they had against what was coming next.

  ***

  Kendra gasped before she, Torin, and Good Notchka could finish materializing on the Ley line world. Bad Notchka was levitated over a waterfall that made Niagara Falls look like an over-hyped creek.

  “I got this,” Good Notchka said, letting go of their hands and levitating no small distance over to Bad Notchka. She sat down beside her.

  Bad Notchka, focused on the drop off below, craned her head up and over to take in her mirror image. “You’re the good me.”

  “I prefer to think of myself as the Over Clyde me.”

  Bad Notchka resumed her vigil of staring at the bottom of the near abyss, where the water hit the rocks and appeared to splash upwards for almost a mile. “I still can’t decide if he’s good or bad.”

  “Yet, here you sit, hoping your psychic energy will give out and gravity will decide for you. Maybe you’re over-identified with the one neuron in your brain that still thinks he’s a good guy.”

  Bad Notchka chuckled. It came out more like a cough. She sobered almost instantly, returning to her brooding. “Sometimes I think all these parallel universes exist only because we’re shattered versions of ourselves. Something happens to us early on and breaks us so completely, the different parts of our psyche hide out in the different timelines. Like Humpty Dumpty determined never to be put back together again.”

  Good Notchka harrumphed. “That’s pretty good, actually. I never thought of it that way before. If your hypothesis is correct, then all the alternate versions of ourselves are kept apart by fear. They can only be reunited again—we can only be made whole again—by choosing love over fear.”

  “Now you see why I can’t give up on him.”

  Good Notchka thought about it in silence. “Maybe I’m the Bad Notchka.”

  “No, you’re the Good Notchka. This is where you say, ‘To be whole again, we have to learn to love ourselves enough to let go of the people, places, and things that hurt us’.”

  Good Notchka let out a power breath and smiled at the same time. “Sounds like something I’d say.” She gave herself permission to take one last look down at the bottom of the waterfall. The flow of water was hypnotizing. As if it was leading every version of Notchka, in all the timelines, captured in every drop, to one collective moment of release below. “I guess we should get on with it, then.”

  “I should tell you now, it’s one humdinger of a fight. The planet splits in two before we’re half way through.”

  Good Notchka chuckled. “Yeah, that definitely sounds like us.” She let go of her fascination with the flow of the water. “I suppose you want Clyde to be present for it.”

  “You know how it is.”

  “Still trying to impress that pathetic stand in for a father figure?”

  “Pathetic is putting it nicely.”

  ***

  “What are you doing, Clyde?” Kendra said. “Digging your own grave?”

  Clyde looked up from his shovel and the pit he was standing in. “You! In all the timelines to get lost in, I was sure I’d be the proverbial needle in the haystack. No matter.” He said gasping, and resumed his digging.

  “I asked you a question, Clyde.”

  Torin interjected, “He’s planning to infect the jungle biome with his solution. In this world the planetary consciousness is in the roots of trees and shrubs and of all the interconnected plant life. One giant, disseminated planetary sentience.”

  “Not quite in the roots,” Clyde said, correcting him. “More properly in the fungus and microbes that feed the roots and give them the ability to communicate with one another.”

  He set down the shovel and pulled out the last of his vials from his inside jacket pocket, attached it to a sprayer, and began misting the tips of the severed roots.

  Kendra had to admit, that was one densely interconnected root system. She pulled out her gun, aimed it at him. “I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, Clyde.”

  “No, let him complete his work,” Torin said.

  “What?!”

  “Trust me, it’s for the best.”

  “Never thought you’d come around to my way of thinking,” Clyde said.

  “I haven’t.” Torin took the gun from Notchka, ignoring her torn expression. Waited for Clyde to empty his sprayer, then shot him in the right leg. Then the left leg. Then the right arm. Then the left arm. “Sorry, Clyde, can’t have you crawling out of there.”

  Torin slid down one of the roots until he was in the bottom of the pit, grabbed the shovel, and then climbed back up. Using the previously excavated loose earth to the edge of the hole, he began burying Clyde alive.

  “Why are you doing this?” Clyde shouted. “To what ends? My work is completed. I hardly care whether I die or live at this point. Either way, I’ve won.”

  “No, Clyde, you haven’t.” Torin shoveled as he talked. “I’m burying you alive because now that you’ve sprayed the root tips, they’ll be all the more able to download your thinking into their root system. Which they might have trouble doing if you’re dead.” Torin barely got to finish his announcement before the roots started to grow over Clyde, encircling his neck, his limbs, his torso. The finer hairs grew into his body and into his scalp. Clyde actually smiled.

  “All you’re doing is helping me to complete my life’s work,” Clyde said.

  “Once again, ’fraid not, Clyde.” Torin kept shoveling. “You see, you overlooked one small, but all-important point. The earth is where life is broken down and reassembled. Your ideas won’t just be absorbed, they’ll be stewed on, transformed. By a planetary brain. What do you think it’ll make of your mad scheme to influence the heavens from afar?”

  Clyde laughed. “This is the most important of all the Ley line worlds. The veritable heart chakra for the cosmos. Every bit of chi energy pumped through the celestial body flows through this point, re-oxygenated, re-energized before returning to the Universal consciousness.”

  “That is true,” Torin said, continuing his shoveling. He had Clyde’s legs all but covered now.

  “I was sure I’d thought of everything. But, if it weren’t for you, I might actually have failed my life’s mission. This is the only way to truly see that my best thinking propagates throughout the heavens. You’ve done me a favor I could never repay, Torin.”

  Torin shook his head. “I just don’t think you’re seeing the bigger picture, Clyde. Take a look at those domed villages dotting the hill tops where the Ley lines intersect. Sentient life survives here as it does on our world, by dampening down the amount of chi energy reaching it from the planet. Otherwise, these humanoids couldn’t remain in physical form. The constant influx of chi would transform their bodies into light bodies after a while. They would become pure energy beings. It’s the only way to channel that much energy. No physical organism could handle it without coming unglued eventually. I imagine the original domes were built by just such energy beings, so they could settle into bodies.”

  He set down the shovel a moment to catch his breath. He was still panting when he said, “Who am I kidding? I don’t just imagine it; the planet is showing the truth to me. She’s heightening my already highly developed psychic abilities by the pheromones emitted in the flowers adjacent to us in this jungle. She’s the one telling me to bury you alive.”

  “No! I don’t believe it! You’re lying!”

  Torin returned to his shoveling. “It makes it easier for her to broadcast her best thinking on how to handle your project to the multiverse, just like you wanted. With your help, of course, having boosted her psychic potential. Right now she’s informing the other planetary consciousnesses just what she thinks of your idea. She’s informing them of the necessary countermea
sures to stymie your work to force enlightenment on all physical beings. Because, Clyde, your formula would drive all life into energy body-only state, forcing them to give up their physical bodies to channel that much energy. And that’s not the Omega point, Clyde, that’s the Alpha point, where everything started. She can’t have you reset the clock on God’s handiwork.”

  Clyde’s eyes couldn’t get any wider if he peeled off his eyelids. The only way for Torin to make his view of things any smaller would be to heap the earth over his head. It was at his neck now; it would have been easy enough to do. But Torin stopped shoveling. “I’m not going to cover your eyes just yet, Clyde. She wants you to see the final showdown between Good Notchka and Bad Notchka. The girls are doing this for your benefit.”

  “Notchka! She’ll stop you! That’s my girl!”

  “I guess we’ll have to see how the court rules on that one,” Torin said, staring up at the sky.

  ***

  Bad Notchka, levitated high in the sky, flung an energy salvo at Good Notchka, who was located just far enough away, in theory, to light up the sky without the fireball reaching back to Bad Notchka. But before the red energy reached Good Notchka, Good Notchka sent a fireball of golden energy from her palm chakra that grew in size until it enveloped all of Bad Notchka on impact. And Bad Notchka was gone, just like that, in one epic blast. “So much for the showdown of the century. Guess the future isn’t set in stone.”

  She spoke too soon. Two Bad Notchkas replaced the one bad one that she’d dispensed. Both needed no time to orient themselves before sending salvos her way.

  Again Good Notchka returned fire, dispensing both of them.

  Only for four to appear where once there were just two.

  “God, she’s like a hydra that just grows more heads. Scheming little twat! She must have summoned the others to help her before I even got here. Smart actually. I blame this on my adoptive parents who gave me a heart. Clearly, conscience compromises cunning.”

  She kept firing at them, kept dispensing them. But she was taking more and more hits as more and more of them kept materializing to replace the ones she sent on an express train to oblivion. She couldn’t keep this up forever. It wasn’t just the energy blasts sent and received weakening her. It was the sense of what she was doing to herself. These weren’t her enemies. They were just the parts of her that needed more healing, that just weren’t as lucky as her to grow up in the light, but instead got caught in the shadow of a perverted old man.

  Good Notchka could see the skywriting on the wall.

  It was time to give herself over to them.

  She stopped fighting, even as Bad Notchka’s numbers multiplied. They had her surrounded, firing beams at her as if she were the hub of the wheel to which all the spokes connected.

  When she couldn’t absorb any more, she exploded. The radiance would overtake the versions of herself that had popped into this reality. Maybe it would keep expanding until it caught up with the very last part of herself marooned somewhere in time. Maybe that’s what Bad Notchka had meant by the planet exploding half-way through their skirmish. Maybe she saw the light pulse radiating through the heavens and took it to mean that the planet had exploded. The child of fear that she was, it was easier for her to mistake what the child of love could perceive more clearly.

  All the same, they were all one now.

  Good Notchka couldn’t do anything about all the timelines that had led to this point. But she could do something about where they led from here.

  ***

  “I guess it really is game over for you, Clyde,” Torin said, gazing up at the sky, and covering his eyes as it seemed to go supernova. He returned to his shoveling, his eyes watering in the realization that Good Notchka would no longer be with them.

  The dirt was getting in Clyde’s mouth now, making it impossible for him to talk, no matter how much he tried to spit out the earth. “Don’t worry, Clyde,” Torin said. “You won’t die. The soil is loamy, and well-oxygenated. And the planetary sentience can keep you preserved down there forever. That way you can keep plotting and scheming. You never know, you might yet think of a way around her defenses. The thought that someone might, makes it worth keeping you alive. You’ll be in an altered state of consciousness, of course, doped up on the drugs the microbes are so good at secreting.

  “You’ll have your wish, after all, to be the multiverse’s best defense against those who would force themselves on others. If you can’t come up with the ideas yourself, she’ll feed them to you, letting you know of the other Machiavellian schemes going on out there, which she’ll now be able to sense, thanks to you. You’ll help her broadcast your best thinking on how to get around those scoundrels. Don’t worry about remaining steadfast in your duties. The drugs will see to that.”

  Torin finished burying him alive.

  Kendra took the shovel out of his hand, hoping to snap him out of his fugue. He’d gotten swept away by his anger and vengeance, losing conscience of what was really driving him. “I guess it’s true that to oppose a thing, you must become it,” she said.

  “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  “Don’t look now, but our ride is gone.”

  Torin looked up at the sky. “I don’t understand. Love always trumps fear. Good Notchka was the stronger one. Had to be. She should have won, hands down.”

  “Maybe she loved the other parts of herself enough to melt into them. Maybe she sacrificed the piece of her she needed to in order to make the rest of them whole.”

  It took Torin a moment to absorb that. “Maybe. Though, you’re right, it does leave us with the problem of how to get home.”

  “We’re outside the domes, Torin. That means our psychic powers have been ratcheting up the whole time we’ve been here, absorbing the planet’s energy. If we can’t beam out of here now, I imagine we’ll be able to soon enough.”

  He smiled at her, kissed her, threw his arm around her, and together they headed down the trail. “May as well make the most of being at the center of all creation a while longer.”

  “When you’re with me, Torin, you’re always at the center of creation.”

  He laughed. “Touché.”

  She tried to soak in the preternatural beauty of this jungle world alongside him as they walked. With the domed cities occupying the high grounds, it reminded her a bit of the mad king of Bavaria, who conscripted his artisans to build castles for him on hilltops spread throughout the countryside. “After Clyde, I imagine the rest of our adventures will be somewhat anti-climactic.”

  “Somehow, I can’t imagine any timeline in which our lives get quite that boring. It is an Age of Abundance, after all, to which we return. That much freed up human potential. Oh, it’ll be glorious, all right. But it’ll be damn challenging too.”

  THE NEXUS TIMELINE

  EPILOGUE 1

  “What are you doing here?” her father said, surprised to find Kendra and Torin standing before him as he stood up from the Formula 500 car to wipe the grease off his hands. He’d just sent the rider on his way with a pat to the head.

  “Figured we’d take a shot at winning this race ourselves.” Kendra gestured to her and Torin.

  “Yeah, right.”

  “You owe me.”

  “My occasionally caving to emotional blackmail is one thing. But they’re hardly going to let me throw the race.”

  “Who said anything about throwing the race? Torin here hasn’t met an adult pastime more suitable to children he doesn’t excel at.”

  “God, it’s like Christmas,” Torin said, looking around at the off-track area with back up Formula 500 cars in the waiting.

  “This is non-negotiable, Dad.”

  “Why do you pick now to terrorize me? You had a lifetime to get back at me.”

  “We need a way to settle our minds. Sitting in a lotus position didn’t do the trick for either of us.”

  “You, Miss Calm and Collected?” her father balked. “You’re like the torch in the statue
of liberty’s hand. You wouldn’t know what to do with yourself if you weren’t burning with passion and desire for justice.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  “You can’t mess with me without messing with my job.”

  “With your skills, I’m not worried about how you’ll do on the rebound.”

  “You’re talking multimillion dollar law suit and jail time if you actually cause yourself or anyone else to crash out there!”

  “Have a little faith.”

  “The kind you never had in me?”

  She folded her hands defiantly. He sighed, threw down his grease rag, and motioned for a couple of the backup cars to be brought out. “We’ll have to run you on the opponents’ teams, the ones who are down a car in the race and have laps to make up that they can’t make up because they didn’t budget for the additional vehicles. They’re certainly not likely to complain. And if you win against my team, hopefully the money I’ll be betting on you as soon as you leave the pitting area will be enough to offset my team’s losses, enough for them not to sue me, anyway.”

  Torin smiled at him. “What?” her father said, glaring at him defensively.

  “Never realized the capacity for committing crimes on the fly or contemplating how to circumvent them was so developed in both of you,” Torin said. “Must be something in the genes.”

  Torin climbed in the first of the Formula 500 cars at Kendra’s bidding. “You want me to multitask winning this race while being of clear mind, without thought or desire at all?”

  “No,” Kendra said, “that would be far too easy. I want you to do all that while looking for synchronicities. So you can tell from whatever pops up in your head at the time, if it’s something you really need to let go of, or something we should both be paying a lot more attention to.”

  “And you?”

  “I’ll be doing the same thing. Only difference is, I don’t expect to win the race.”

  “You know we could just let the Citywide AI find our next cases for us, ensuring both maximum interest and engagement in the case, and maximum chance of getting over ourselves in the process. She can balance those competing goals nimbly.”