“I was thinking he reads too much Gods and Monsters.”
She turned to face the dragon morph. “And you are?”
“We dragon morphs do not give our names easily. It is something of immense power that can then be used against us.”
She harrumphed. “Maybe on a second date.”
“Am I to take that as—”
“You’re to take it as a last ditch effort to experience some joy at the end of times.” She returned her eyes to Soren drifting to the ground below. No doubt he was headed to the next huntress. “At one time I thought magic would end us. And then I thought for sure the transhumanists with their technologies too advanced for anyone to wield sensibly without wreaking havoc on the earth would do us in. Turns out all this time my fears were for naught. It would be an alien queen, trying to up me at my own game of bitch goddess extraordinaire.”
The dragon morph chuckled; more like a dragon’s snort, really.
THIRTY-THREE
“Where are we?” Player was put on edge by the surfeit of metal, despite being an elemental wizard. This metal had properties of which he was unaware. Even with the triad magic expanding his ability to create new additions to the periodic elements with ease, and with Aeros and Airy by his side to facilitate putting those new elements to the test, this place gave him the creeps. It did not feel like a tomb he was raiding, intent on getting at its secrets with his new superpowers. It felt more like a tomb he would be buried in for the rest of time.
“We’re inside one dimension of the alien queen’s mind,” Aeros explained.
“It can’t actually look like this,” Player protested.
“No, of course not. She is permitting us to interact with her mind in a way that will serve our investigations,” Aeros explained.
Player grunted. “Damn nice of her.”
“There’s nothing nice about her,” Airy said, speaking at last, after running some preliminary surveys on their new digs. By “surveys” Player meant she’d been subjecting their new environment to a series of chemical bombardments, all emitted from the fine pores of her aerogel body, as she continued to float about the chamber, like a balloon, bouncing off the ceiling and the walls.
“We should probably summon Lar and his team, being as tomb raiding is more his thing.” Player didn’t like asking for help, but something about this place was setting him on edge.
“It’s not a bad idea,” Airy said. “It might be why the Fenquin queen configured these chambers to look like this, to prompt the revelation, and the invitation. Maybe we need to link the triad magic of the two groups to get at the treasure hidden here.”
The husband nodded slowly, chewing on the chestnut. “Perhaps. Though I can already tell you we’re inside one of the nanites in her hive mind.”
“Impossible!” Airy blared. Apparently, for her, attacking her logic centers was right up there with trying to stick a knife in her throat. “Even if we could be scaled down that much, our minds and bodies would work by entirely different laws, if they worked at all, laws pertaining to quantum dynamics, not Einsteinian space-time.”
“You’re preaching to the choir, dear.” Her husband’s voice, devoid of emotions, sounded practiced, as if he’d been down this road before with her.
“One more reason to get Lar and his people in on this,” Player said, shivering. He might have been more weirded out than the other two on account to his being an elemental wizard. “This place… the nanites I mean, if this one is like the others… The shapes of these chambers, the all-too familiar pyramid construction… The exact dimensions of the rooms, the construction of the panels on the walls, their complex polymer makeups—it’s how the nanite functions, works its particular magic, without any moving parts. Well, with few moving parts, anyway, assuming this is like any other pyramid, with trap doors and hidden rooms.
“God, I wonder if there really is something to pyramid power, more so than anyone ever imagined anyway. I read this kooky theory once…”
“What has you so rattled, Player?” Airy asked.
Player realized he was rambling. He was so spooked he was losing the ability to speak sense. “You’ll have to excuse me. The makeup of these composite panels, it’s fucking with my elemental magic in ways I don’t understand. It might be making me a bit loopy.”
Lar and his confederates, Ry and An materialized, joining the group. “I was wondering how to get a message out to you,” Player said.
“The second the rising stress level of your triad surpassed a threshold, we were summoned here immediately,” Lar explained. “I didn’t know how or why until I took a look at your faces.”
Ry and Ann were already communicating via their mindchips with Aeros and Airy to get the rest of the picture; they were all transhumanists with fat data pipes facilitating communication between them that made words rather pointless; they would have occupied less than one percent of the data streams they could share wirelessly between their minds. Though Player was surprised those communications weren’t down in here, and their upgrades—largely constructed of metal composites as well—weren’t also being disturbed by the panels lining the pyramid-shaped nanite they were infesting. That had to mean they were what, operating at a sub-atomic scale?
Lar was already exploring the cabbalistic symbols on the panels of the nanite-pyramid they were in, tracing his fingers over them. “If this thing is a computer, albeit a very small one, then these cabbalistic patterns describe its functions, or rather enable it to do what it does.”
“Not exclusively,” Player said. “The composite metals in the panels of the pyramid, they’re fucking with my elemental magic, making me nervy, throwing my endorphins out of whack, making it hard to concentrate, among other things.”
“Interesting,” Lar replied, running his tongue over the metal surfaces of the walls now, as if tasting it might convey information to him he could decode. Player thought the idea silly and ridiculous, as well as the act itself, until he recalled their sex magic that was in part how they’d gotten here. Soren and the beast had given each of the groups a glimpse of what the others were up to prior to slipping through the portal into the Fenquin queen’s mind. The Lar triad sex magic might well be put to other purposes, including using the heightened sensitivity in their bodies for collecting information—as with the taste conveyed on his tongue.
Among the transhumanists, Airy was the most adept at cabbalistic magic, but she would have downloaded her understanding and her aptitudes to the rest of the transhumans in the chamber now, leaving her with just a slight edge—her very passion for the subject—over what they could each do.
“I suggest the rest of you explore this place,” Lar said. “You can scan all the symbols and go to work on them with your group mind that I see you’re eager to hold on to.”
The foursome nodded, and immediately broke up their huddle, exploring down the adjoining chambers.
“As for you and I…” Lar said, “I suggest we get to the root of just how this place is messing with your elemental magic.”
“One step ahead of you.” Player rubbed his temples and groaned. “This subatomic realm… I’ve interacted with it intuitively, to form elements, but inside here, it’s my left-brain that’s fired up, and it can’t deal with all the intel.”
“Makes sense,” Lar said, “considering how left-brain dominant the queen is.” Lar blinked and scrunched up his face, as if the air they were breathing that was saturated with metal micro-particles was irritating his eyes and the near-invisible dust congealing on his tongue. When he opened his eyes, he said, “Cypher to the rescue.” He had shifted into his Cypher alter. “I’ll help you decode the subatomic language you’ll need to make sense of elemental magic at this level.”
Lar put his hands up to Player, as if he was doing the Vulcan mind meld from Star Trek, but he was actually using the triad magic that interlocked their two three-partner units. And he was availing himself of Aeros and Airy’s and Ry and An’s supercomputing abilities to assis
t him, jacking into the minds of the others in both three-party units. Cypher had the acumen, but now he was using the others for their sheer data crunching abilities.
In no time, Player was coming out of his fog. “I’m feeling clearer,” he said. “What did you do?” He winced as if to belie his words, but he stood up straighter; his mind had been weighing him down as if he was carrying an anvil on his shoulders.
“I just grew the neuronal webs in your left-brain so they were a match for your right brain, so both hemispheres could share the workload of processing the gold mine of information in here,” Lar replied. “Don’t ask me how I did it, other than to say it took all six of our minds working on the problem, yours included, to pull off the magic.”
“But the others…”
“Are no newcomers to parallel processing. They’re quite capable of assisting us while they tackle the assignment I set for them.”
Player was learning another lesson. Being in control was less important to him than he thought. Mostly he wanted to become a more accomplished wizard. If he ever expected others to follow him the way they followed Soren, it was going to take less pushing people around and acting as if he was in control, and learning more real skills. His ego may not have shrunk any, but his pragmatism was growing in leaps and bounds.
Lar let go of him and said, “It’s time for us to find those booby traps.” He took his first step and promptly landed on his face.
Player helped him up. “Captain Klutz to the rescue,” the latest alter said.
Player smiled at him. “You’re one seriously messed up guy. This takes all kinds of pressure off me. I think we can be friends.”
Captain Klutz ignored him; he had no idea what Player was talking about. But he did have a fix on their first trap door. He’d stumbled onto it using that ability he had of doing the worst possible thing at the worst possible time.
The disturbing sounds they were hearing… They were preamble to the ground giving way. Lar and Player found themselves tumbling through a subterranean passage.
The tunnel, like an air duct venting the pyramid, eventually let out—on an open field of all things.
“What is it?” Player asked. “It looks like a farm? Is this how the nanite sustains itself; its food source?”
“No, it’s where it processes the dreams and fantasies of countless souls.” Captain Klutz put his foot on the field covered with moss like a finely woven carpet. The moss acted more like a crystal ball as soon as he stepped on it, showing him Captain Klutz-like adventures. Player wasn’t sure if this was stuff Captain Klutz had already done, or things he might do.
“There’s no way this small nanite has all this processing power,” Player said.
“Ah, but search your newly revamped brain, and you’ll realize it isn’t so.” It was Cypher talking to Player; he recognized Cypher’s voice as distinct from Captain Klutz’s; it sounded more professorial and less like a cartoon character.
Player decided that Cypher’s proposal made sense. He closed his eyes and centered his mind. “Oh my God.”
“Oh my God, indeed. We thought we might be over our heads; we just had no idea by how much.”
If Player was understanding the biophysics of this subatomic realm properly, the Fenquin queen could not only access alternate timelines easily, she could handle or field any number of demands placed on her by her subjects—read the subjugated people she’d conquered without them even realizing—by virtue of keying into a very fundamental property of this realm. Keyed in this directly to the divine ground as the Buddhists described it, she could pull any amount of energy she needed and convert it to matter. Just a thimble full of super dense energy would suffice to fill a planet full of matter, again owing to the weird dynamics of this realm, and in part to one aspect of Einsteinian physics which did hold up here: E=mc2.
Any one of these specks of nanite-dust percolating through her brain could reconstitute the entire brain. If only one remained, it would automatically recreate all the others just like itself, reformulating the brain—which bridged all parallel universes and timelines at once.
The Fenquin queen’s mind was a gateway to the multiverse. It functioned at a multiverse level—her brain spanning all timelines, real and imagined, those that existed now, those that had fallen to time, those yet to come into being.
There was simply no way to defeat her. Not at their level, certainly. If it were possible, it would take a cosmic wizard functioning at this level—or higher—assuming there was a higher level.
Soren and the beast’s entourage of triad-interlinked wizards—the whole lot of their mind power combined, even multiplied many times over by the various magics they were wielding, was like a drop of water in the pool upon which they were gazing, which in turn was but a drop in a much larger ocean.
The only thing the mind power of the two interlocking three-person teams could do now was broadcast the information and the distress signal to Soren and the beast.
That said, Player and Cypher opted to wait to hear what the rest of their two teams had to say about the cabbalistic scrawling on the walls of the pyramid they were exploring.
When that communiqué came through, the revelation was nearly as devastating.
The cabbalistic magic inscribed on the walls… It was seed magic, no more. The mother passed it on to her daughter so that the infant could exercise its mind in the womb on it, use it as kindling to get the fire of its higher sentience burning. It was nothing beyond a complex triptych, the solution of which would trigger the awakening of the infant’s higher brain centers. It had no real magic on its own.
Soren and the beast had formulated the triad magic off of the three panels, thinking they were decoding one level of the Fenquin queen’s multidimensional magic. It had derived most every other form of magic simply by extrapolating incorrectly from the nature of the underlying symbols.
If Soren and the beast had proven anything—it was a genuine genius to use the Fenquin queen’s birth song, as it were, to nourish their own mind. But this was no different than someone staring at a Rorschach pattern long enough that they not only saw what wasn’t there, but fried their mind repeatedly until it had no choice but to regrow—more powerful than before—and madder than ever.
The joke? The magic of threes. Any one of these two debilitating revelations was enough to convey that they had been playing a fool’s game all along; that any hope of throwing off the yoke of the Fenquin queen was the hope of the hopeless. But they could rest assured, there was one more equally devastating revelation to come.
THIRTY-FOUR
Soren kept his eyes on Naomi; she wasn’t real of course, just an avatar he’d created to keep him sane while he waited patiently for her to throw off her oppressor, Cosmos, the same way that he and everyone else were trying to free themselves from the Fenquin queen’s influences.
Naomi at least had some chance of soliciting Cosmos’s cooperation. From what he could tell by way of the beast’s telepathic link to her, she’d already made impressive inroads in that area.
But he didn’t have the heart to break it to her that with the two revelations conveyed from Lar’s and Player’s teams, they didn’t stand a chance. Even if she broke free of Cosmos, she would remain forevermore a captive of the Fenquin queen, as they all would.
He couldn’t even lie to Naomi’s avatar, realizing that the only thing gazing back into his eyes was a thought projection, kept alive by his loneliness; his inability to be away from her for this long.
And that was the third and final nail in their coffin. The realization that the Fenquin queen—in her loneliness—separated from her people and her mate—was devoting all of her mind power to relishing her children. She was treating everyone she encountered in the cosmos as her babies, loving them to death. Her saturation of their minds might well mature them faster than they could ever mature on their own, but long before they ripened into maturity, long before they reunited with their oversoul—the part of themselves that could inte
grate the lessons from all lifetimes—they would be forever more complacent; they would be her subjects first and foremost. She would be the fertile ground in which their minds took root, and in which all life and all that mattered arose.
She was not only a god relative to them; she was better than a belief in any God whose existence no one could really prove.
And as for the people like Soren and the beast, and the wizards he’d drawn to him—the most incorrigible bastards who would fight harder and longer than anyone to ensure that all sentient beings remained free…. What were they in the end—but the viruses allowed to run wild in the Fenquin queen’s mind? They served the function of any good virus—to strengthen the immune system of the host. The more they succeeded the more they would fail; and the stronger she would get.
It really was game over.
The realization that he’d just lost everything, even hope, caused Naomi to disappear just as she was coming in for another sublime kiss.
Natura, who had conjured this nature paradise for them—a cliché really of an island paradise—well, she was off in the distance talking to her animals. This was as much her retreat from reality as it was his.
The picnic blanket Soren had spread for him and Naomi, figuring that they’d finally earned a rest, a chance to regroup before the final push to flush the Fenquin queen from their universe… It was littered with picnic basket food and ants.
The ants reminded him of the nanites that made up the Fenquin queen’s unassailable mind. He smashed them with an unrivaled fury and a matching sense of impotence.
As he crushed the bones in the chicken legs and breasts and thighs into paste with the strength of the beast, emitting the roars of the damned, realizing that all their good deeds had not earned them purgatory, had not spared them the flames, one thought managed to pierce the crust of angry, mixed emotions, erupting through it with a fury no less violent.
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