Reawakened

by Dean C. Moore

  Yes! It’s why Stealy has been so silent, why she has been deepening her trance this entire time. She means to steal the coding right out of the alien computer. With that shorthand, Vima will have everything she needs to realign the transmitter.

  Stealy let out a roar like her idling motorbike might make finding a gear not on her transmission as she sent herself and Ramon into the solid space of the computer as if it were mere thought projection. Once inside, Ramon’s mathematical mind felt hypnotized by the elegance of the computer architecture and its engineering. Stealy used her link with his mind to steal his understanding as well as to how that engineering facilitated the cabbalistic shorthand; they were two sides of the same coin, needing one another to really work. With both these dimensions of the solution in hand, Soren and the beast would be able to use the mandala magic that Victor had gifted Soren to open up Cantor sets—limited infinities—on Soren’s mindchip, that might go far to close the gap with the alien queen’s superior intellect. But how much gap closing were they talking about, really? The answer to that question was beyond Ramon’s understanding, as it fell to the Soren triad to pick up the hacking from here, with the expertise that alliance and that alliance alone could bring.

  Maybe that was why Vima was so keen on firing up the triad magic of Lar, Ry and An. They must have had some missing piece that the Soren triad was going to need to dethrone the alien queen. Just what was that missing piece exactly?

  NINETEEN

  Lar had never managed to squeeze himself into a lotus position before without forming a topological knot with his limbs from which he could never escape. He remembered calling 911 the last time to get him out of the pose. The time before that, he had to explain to the paramedics why there was a coke bottle from the 1950s stuck up his ass, due to some brief experiments with auto-erotica. It was not a fond recollection. They didn’t buy the time machine explanation or his black hole theory either.

  But this time around he found his way into the meditative pose with ease; perhaps because he was distracted from his own fumbling nature by the glorious naked, statuesque forms of Ry and An, sitting in matching poses to either side of him. They were allowing him to trace the fingers of each hand down their fronts, and as he did so, their forms changed in keeping with his fantasies. Ry’s breasts and dick changed sizes in relation to one another, as did her clitoris; the same was happening with An.

  The triad magic that Vima had briefed them on as an enticement to bring them into one another’s arms was working. They, in turn, were fingering pressure points along his spine, or wherever they felt a need to send energy to him to get him to loosen up further.

  It wasn’t quite tantric sex yet, in fact it wasn’t really sex at all; he wasn’t sure this even qualified as foreplay; it felt childlike in its tentativeness. But he was digging it all the same.

  Against his lean naked physique, his thick phallus rose like an anachronism. It belonged on another body entirely.

  Ry surprised him by rising up onto her two legs, and lifting him up effortlessly, and bobbing him up and down on her phallus. It had never dawned on Lar that all those nanites percolating through her body might have uses pertaining to sex—such as lending her superhuman strength. She had elongated her torso so he could simultaneously nibble at her nipples and suck on them. She was excreting fluids from her breasts—not breast’s milk, something else entirely. A clear, watery solution that tasted like honey laced with kiwi and it was doing something to him.

  It was forcing Lar off the stage of his mind! How could she betray him like this? Lar was the one with the hard on for hermaphrodites, not Cypher, not Captain Klutz. Cypher took the stage to the sound of Lar screaming in the distance, his voice fading as if he were falling down a very deep well.

  Cypher responded to the nanites streaming into his body. They were taking his way with decoding cryptic messages to a higher level—particularly in regards to the magic of the Natura Cabbala that Soren, the beast, and Natura had forged together. This coding system was entirely new to him. And though Natura was behind much of it, her understanding was limited; the magic just flowed from her without any great understanding of its true nature, or how it worked exactly.

  That was why the triad of Lar-Ry-An was now opening a bridge to the Soren triad.

  The energy soaring through Cypher at the moment of the linkup nearly caused him to pass out. As Cypher’s spine went limp, he flopped back into An’s arms, where she promptly shoved her phallus into his mouth. He was the parallel bar now, forming the H, as he lay suspended between the two standing women.

  An’s pre-cum lubricated his mouth as Ry’s breast milk had. Whatever the nature of this nanite cocktail in the pre-cum, it was different. How exactly, he couldn’t put his fingers on yet. But his sense of euphoria was growing, as he splayed his fingers along An’s still very rounded hips. The gagging and choking sounds he was making with her phallus driving deep into his throat came across like the notes played on a reedy wind instrument; each note subtly deepening the altered state he was slipping into.

  If this was tantric sex, it was nothing like he’d read about in the Karma Sutra. But it felt divine. Every cell in his body tingled. Every molecule vibrated, musically, rhythmically; he could hear the music rising up from their vibrations. He was no longer paying attention to Cypher’s decoding magic. His conscious mind has split off from Cypher, descending further into the erotic bliss of the sex magic of the ménage-a-trois firing up finally. He had no idea how that sex magic blended with the triad magic, and for right now, he didn’t care. The bliss was just too overpowering. And his intellectual centers, retreated to the deepest realms of his unconscious were getting overheated as well. They had now tapped into the quantum computing of the Jungian unconscious mind, shared not just by all sentient life on the planet—but by all life in the cosmos.

  As Cypher’s quantum mind fired up, for its next hat trick it started splitting its parallel computing across the holographic universe—out of which all parallel universes emerged. The mind power was as intoxicating to Cypher’s unconscious psyche as the Eros of the sex magic was to Cypher’s conscious mind. As before, one part of his psyche couldn’t do the work without the other.

  He had no idea what the unconscious supercomputing was up to. For that was now under the control of Soren and the beast.

  All Cypher’s conscious self could think was, would this be enough to get around the alien queen?

  Or would it just give the earth alliance of wizards the fighting chance they needed as underdogs, buying them a little time?

  That was when the full ejaculate from An’s phallus shot into his mouth.

  And this game hit a whole other level.

  ***

  Ry, An, and Lar were hovering about one another in mid-air in Lar’s basement apartment in Soren’s building, where they’d chosen to hookup and consummate their first sexual union. It was largely a concession to Lar who didn’t feel he could make it to the Transhumanist sector on his own without accidentally killing himself, or triggering yet another apocalypse.

  No longer joined physically, chi energy was shooting out the seven primary chakras running along their spines into one another; that, in itself, was not the subject of fascination. It was the complete topological geometries being formed by the twisting of those cables of energy in and around one another as they continued to thread themselves through the seven chakras in one another’s bodies multiple times over. Those geometries just grew more complicated as more of their subordinate chakras came into play.

  With each new geometry, altered states of consciousness became available to the triad. Linked with Soren, the beast, and Natura, Cypher’s quantum unconscious mind was now supercomputing with the various code-writing aptitudes now opened up by these altered states of consciousness. This in turn was accelerating the hacking of the alien queen’s language, aided as this effort was further by access to the shorthand version of the language supplied by the Vima-Stealy-Ramon triad.

  For C
ypher’s conscious mind, there was little to do but get lost in the light show, the Eros continuing to flow through his physical body…. It was like dropping acid before one very cool planetarium show.

  As eager as Cypher was to understand what Soren was up to, all he could gather for now was that his strategies and tactics employed against the alien queen were being carefully shielded within layers of magic that Lar’s triad did not have access to—certainly not to all of the layers.

  But Cypher could feel the build up to something. The sex magic that was particularly keyed to such pending climactic events could sense the three of them, Ry, An, and Cypher, moments away from climaxing. Weird how the sex magic was becoming a whole new dimension of the drama to overthrow the queen. About all Cypher could make of it was that it involved yin and yang balancing—a strong suit for those who wielded this magic—and an area of vulnerability for the alien queen—so long as she remained left-brain dominant.

  It was one more edge, and Soren and the beast were determined to make it work for them.

  TWENTY

  Cosmos strolled the streets of the Shelley’s London Sector of Syracuse, NY, entirely unimpressed. She had been on worlds where the whole planet was given over to such roleplaying games, the various lifeforms all too happy to occupy a historical niche on the magic carpet of time—even if that piece of history was never truly real.

  If she had any emotional reaction to what she was seeing, it was sheer horror. The alien queen, finished with her experiments, had found it easy to infiltrate the minds of everyone in this sector as she had everyone on the planet. The locals had never been happier. No sallow cheek looks. No sunken eyes. No haunted expressions. The hops farmers were happily pulling up their horse- and ox-drawn carts with their bales of hops for the beer brewers. The bartenders were gaily serving up mead at the bar to boisterous patrons who couldn’t stop celebrating life. Hunters and huntresses plied their trade with more than their usual gusto, leaping from rooftops, climbing up through storm drains, all in a quest to drive their arrows, lances, and knives into rabid werewolves who no longer hunted wisely to cull the flock of humans of its weakest numbers. Even the werewolves had a sparkle in their eyes.

  So long as the alien queen was inside their heads, the district’s role-players were all performing at the top of their game, discovering new ways to ply their trade that had never occurred to them before, and prospering greatly on account of the latest creative breakthroughs.

  Cosmos walked by the sidewalk venders, hawking magic-infused jewelry. The complex topological geometries—a branch of mathematics known as knot theory—in the hands of master craftsmen and wizards became meditative focal points, concentrating the mind so that it could gain access to the parallel universes and other dimensions described by the knots themselves. Einstein may have described our universe as saddle shaped, but if you wanted to gain access to these other universes—you had to first tune into their very nature, embodied in shapes of those topological geometries.

  When last Cosmos had walked these streets, such trinkets were not to be found; the connection between the sacred geometries and alternate universes were not known to any but the mandala magicians, and they were not given to such pastimes. The jewelry would not have been needed to focus their minds, which could procure the shapes for themselves.

  The old woman whose table was filled with such silver, bronze, and copper knots stuck out her tongue at Cosmos to show her the tattoo carved into it—another topological knot. Other venders up and down the street had the topological knots on their legs above their ankles, on their shoulders, some on their chests. The various knot-jewelry salesmen and women were already carving out niches for themselves; with those tattoos on their bodies they could channel still more esoteric wares—pulling the ideas right out of the minds living in those universes. The same way artists in any era had their finger on the pulse of their generation; only these artists had their fingers on the pulse of another people on another world in another space and time. But like any good export-import business, you had to know which trinkets would do well with your local constituencies. And these venders were not coming up short in that area.

  The talisman, carved into werewolves and vampires and various chimera—any number of shapeshifters—had etched into the accursed creatures an extra level of detail. Look closely and you’d see the topological knots in the swirls of the werewolves’ matted hair, in the swirling irises of their eyes; for the vampires, these finer carvings made their wings and their eyes more ornate, and for the vampires in human form, the weaves of their suits flowed with the intricate closed-loop geometries; and like true mathematical knots, these knots couldn’t be undone, and neither could their magic.

  Shelley’s London was enjoying a new renaissance era as a result of the dark magic in the region hitting new heights.

  Even low-grade wizards were visible on the avenue walking their “dogs” – werewolves, some on leashes, some didn’t require them; their training so advanced, they simply walked in step with their masters without need of a collar tethered to a submission line. The wizards walking their werewolves and vamps like pets sported the magical knots hanging on shoelace strings and made of cheap metals; the low grade craftsmanship hardly mattered; the magic still worked. The werewolves themselves came with different abilities, borrowed from each of these alternate universes they were keying to. Though they shared some things in common: none of them needed a full moon to turn or even the nighttime. Cosmos was taking her promenade in late morning, when trading activity among the street venders was high.

  Some of the pet vampires, being walked the way kids walked with kites—tethered to strings and soaring overhead, would periodically indulge themselves. Of course, like the werewolves keyed via the shape of the knots worn by the pets’ owners, their behavior was also somewhat altered from the norm. One vampire swooped down just ahead of Cosmos, opened its mouth wide, shot out a net—patterned in the knot worn by its master—throwing it about a young girl, and drawing her in to its mouth, the magic of the net shrinking her down to make it easy for the vampire to swallow her whole.

  One of the werewolves darted off its leash, bolting down the street. Up where the road dead-ended, it charged through the wall without slowing. Once inside the home of the downstairs tenant, it went straight for the jugular of the chimera that was still partly in human form but caught up in a nightmare. Still asleep, the morphing was going on unconsciously. The werewolf took in the blood from the jugulars as a vampire might, evidently keyed to the magic of the chimera while in dreamstate and dreamstate alone. It was perhaps bred to feed that way as a means of containing the chimera in the district to acceptable numbers.

  Cosmos, with her ability to collapse space and time with her eyes to see up close even what was transpiring in the distance could attest that even while dying, the chimera seemed only too keen to embrace its fate, as if it were some reward; like a Christian hastening to the Promised Land knowing he had lived a life in keeping with God’s dictates.

  “Care to sample the magic of my universe?” one of the venders said, entreating Cosmos as he passed his hand over his selection sprawled on black velvet to highlight the knots traced in various metals, against which their black shoestring necklaces could easily get lost, keeping the focus on the amulets.

  Since she deigned to slow, as if to entertain the man’s come on, the tall, lanky proprietor, with the very long, rounded-rectangle of a face, piled on, unspooling his sales pitch. “If you simply meditate on the shapes, you’ll find the nature of the various magics will reveal themselves to you.”

  She didn’t meditate on the amulets, of course. But the man’s choice of words sent a shiver down Cosmos’ back. At once she understood the alien queen’s intent. A world filled with no two magics alike, meant no two people wielding the same magic; that was quite a barrier to anyone using magic of any kind against her. The sum and sundry wizards would be attuned to some sliver of her mind which existed in so many dimensions. Even if th
ey all got together to gang up on her, what were they wielding in the end but weapons that were subsets of her much larger arsenal of magic tricks, which she understood a lot better than they did.

  Cosmos wondered briefly how she was going to get past the queen’s impressive defensive ploy. And then, all in an instant, everything changed. The glimmer went out of the eyes of the locals. The sum and sundry magics vanquished back into the void from whence they’d come. It was Shelley’s London as it had been before the alien queen.

  She was just gone; Cosmos couldn’t sense the alien queen’s presence anywhere on the planet.

  The paupers were back to begging for change and shooting scared looks over their shoulders at any squeaking of wooden doors in the wind that sounded suspiciously like a werewolf’s growl. Fear permeated their eyes, the fear of pragmatists, all too aware of what Shelley’s London meant to them. They knew it was the middle of the day, so the sounds couldn’t have been traced back to werewolf growls of vampire shrieks, but it didn’t matter; they couldn’t afford to override those reflexes even once, because should such overriding become the norm, it would soon lead to death.

  Cosmos searched for an explanation. She decided to use Naomi’s mind link with Soren and the beast. The passive girl was only too happy to offer up her way of implicating herself into such human networks.

  Using the link, Cosmos found what she wanted. So, these primitive human wizards had game, or some of them did, anyway. Soren and the beast had found a way to redirect the crystal transmitter created by the alien queen’s master race so many millennia ago. Her people had come here to replenish the gold stores needed to get their ship back to their home world. Finding it easy to enslave the humans with their minds, they built what technology they needed to when they came up short.