Reawakened

by Dean C. Moore

  “Merry Christmas,” she said, smiling, as she kissed him.

  Ramon used the fractal geometries of his mind, the countless mandala shapes in his brain that he usually used to hide away secrets, or to grind away on problems, using the mindpower the mandalas were able to bleed off his higher consciousness for him without draining his ability to be present in the moment. This time he used those numberless chambers in his mind, like so many pyramid vaults, to accept the upsurge of energy flowing through the constellation of pyramids as they collectively lit up at once.

  Stealy, snatching into the Fenquin queen’s mind to steal her attention away from her rebelling subjects, got her to open up to the transmission coming from those pyramids across so many worlds. The broadcast has been meant to be tapped by a mind such as the Fenquin queen’s, at a time when the sentience of the various worlds had reached a point that it was worth the psychic vampire descending to suck it all up, to enslave the races. Prior to the Christmas tree lighting up, what could be gained from such a maneuver for a race like the Fenquins just wasn’t worth it.

  The queen needed the dose of psychic energy to bring her rebelling subjects back into line. She was eager to suck it up.

  But with Ramon part of the loop, and the ability of the fractal geometries in his mind—lit up with this much energy—to reach out to alternative timelines… Well, the Fenquin queen got more than she bargained for. His psyche was reaching out to the other rosaries of pyramids connected to one another throughout all of those timelines. The power surge hitting her was too great. If it wasn’t enough to fry her mind, then it would shake her grip on her subjects entirely, forcing her to let go, or to commit suicide like part of her no doubt wanted to do.

  And if Ramon had overestimated the reach of his mandala magic united with Stealy’s and Vima’s—even now, Vima was contributing her womb magic to the birth of this “moment of liberation,” rubbing her stomach and spreading her legs from the floating barge of ice, moaning with the pain of the delivery of the phantom child—then whatever the hell else Soren and the beast were up to, coordinating this orchestra of wizards, surely…

  In the end, the only thing left standing for any of them was hope.

  FORTY-FIVE

  “It can’t take this many wizards working in concert to shake off one Fenquin queen. It just can’t. Not even these cosmic wizards could be this bad ass.” Lar was mumbling to himself, pacing his basement flat in Soren’s warehouse in Shelley’s London that he’d made over into quite the library of mystical works. He had one of his tomes of magic in his hands and was flipping pages.

  Ry and An regarded one another and smiled. “You don’t usually pray aloud, Lar. You pray in silence. And let’s not pretend that was a rational statement as opposed to a prayer.” Ry, currently in female form, tried to disguise the condescension in her voice as a genuine reaction of pleasure to how cute he was being; she found him quite the squeeze toy. In short, she had managed to be more condescending, not less.

  Not that he could be bothered to notice. He had been tasked with finding a spell that could make the most of Ry’s and An’s souped-up left brains, a consequence of being inhabitants of the Transhumans district.

  “Maybe we’re going about this all wrong,” An said. “Going toe to toe with the Fenquin queen on expanded mind power, courtesy of some spell concocted by a mind as small as an ant’s relative to hers… Forgedda about it. I tell you what might work.”

  Lar looked up from his book at her as did Ry. “The androgyny” they all said at once.

  “Of course. Why didn’t I see that?” Lar stuffed the book back on the shelf against the wall of his basement.

  “The Fenquin queen is left-brain dominant,” Ry said. “It’s what allowed the savant to get around her for so many generations, by hacking her right brain, and her unconscious, the realms she had little use for and put little credence in. It was like the back door pass to an otherwise unhackable computer.”

  “If we promised to give her access to her whole brain, if only briefly, so she had the mindpower she needed to throw off this all-out assault on her…” An said, continuing for Ry—They were always finishing one another’s thoughts—Lar found it quite annoying.

  “I love the poetry of it,” Ry said. “That’s how she keeps her subjects enslaved, isn’t it, by giving them everything they want? Why shouldn’t we turn that against her? Seems like divine justice to me.”

  “And I think I have just the spell.” Lar looked up from the book.

  “Is that Lar talking, or Cypher, or Captain Klutz.”

  “It’s Influx. Any of those three losers alone would never have pulled the needle out of the haystack.”

  Ry and An smiled at one another, but the smile telegraphed uneasiness; Influx was a unknown; they were just beginning to get their minds around Lar’s other personas.

  “And when you say the words of power?” Ry and An asked at once. They had mind-linked; it was as much a defensive move in the face of the unknown of Influx, as anything.

  “The time and space separating her mind and ours won’t matter anymore. She’ll get the message loud and clear. And hopefully…”

  “Open her mind to us,” Ry and An said, continuing to talk from their mind-sync state.

  “And then?” they said after looking away from one another and back at Influx, the tone accusative and testy, and most of all unsure. Even Influx was feeling out of his depth.

  “Once she grants access to every dimension of her mind, left and right brain, conscious and unconscious, Soren and the beast will have what they need to use the Zone Magic against her. If I had to guess,” Influx continued, “I’d say they will likely use her own newly restored oversoul access to lecture her on the error of her ways, to get her to back off her emotional neediness, and to accept the sacrifice of the savant’s child as her new mate with which to spawn a new civilization. After all, haven’t the queen’s subjects been making sacrifices to the gods from day one? It may well strike her as the ultimate sign of love; just what she needs to let go.”

  Ry an An were nodding even as they error-checked his thinking through their amped up brains, processing their back and forth quibbles over the issue at light speed, mind chip to mind chip and nanite hive minds—of which their bodies had many—to nanite hive minds.

  “Let’s do this,” they both said.

  Influx commenced reciting the words of power. They were variations on the cabbalistic magic that they’d been working with all along that was but “baby formula brain food” for the infant queen, something she’d outgrown long ago. It was Influx’s guess that the queen, like the rest of them, went through various stages of adult development like Piaget’s stages of child development. And that each birth into higher consciousness involved feeding off of new “brain food.”

  Where exactly Soren had gotten his hand on this spell in the book Influx was reciting from would be a subject for another time. Floating in that Samadhi tank of his, no doubt, time traveling to solutions ahead of problems—using a fringe science that was as much magic as science that he scarcely understood himself.

  Ironically, even with the answer in hand, finding the elusive spell and using it at the right moment had proven so difficult that numerous forms of magic had to be engaged just to get a fix on the spell’s whereabouts; even then the timing had to be right. Maybe this was just one of the secrets of how things worked at the level of cosmic wizardry. Influx relished the opportunity to meditate on all these issues at a later time.

  The words of power he was reciting he could pronounce only with access to his oversoul by way of the Zone Magic. Not even Cypher’s ability with decoding and languages would have been much use to them in their timeframe against a language meant to be used by far more evolved minds.

  The portal to the queen’s mind was opening.

  Shit, what had they done?

  ***

  The Fenquin queen responded to the catalyst that was the new “baby formula” being fed her by Influx. The va
rious dimensions of her mind started to shift into alignment.

  She would be expecting the access to cosmic energies pursuant to that alignment to hit her like a shot of snorted cocaine—to put it in human terms.

  But the triad of Ry, An, and Influx had nothing more for her.

  All they had was hope that Soren and the beast were ready to make their move.

  If the Soren/beast dyad had been synced with their minds all along, telepathically linked in, they had kept their monitoring so low key so as to avoid compromising the originality of any of the working group minds that… Well, the flip side was that none of them could be sure if Soren and the beast were even sharing the party line.

  FORTY-SIX

  And just like that the Soren-beast-Natura triad was in play. Soren had been biding his time, lending his patience to the beast to keep his outbursts from destroying his lab. Not that he’d had much luck with that. The place was in shambles courtesy of the primitive ways the beast had of channeling his rage.

  All the same, their triad’s time had finally come. Soren and the beast worked rapidly to align the Fenquin queen’s mind with the oversoul by way of their Zone Magic they now wielded. They had precious little time in which to shift her identification from this lifetime to the oversoul, the whole of her soul, instead of the sliver of it.

  And in that time they needed the Zone Magic so they could make the plea to her in her language, in a way that she would understand the message in the brief time that they had.

  All that was well and good, but without Natura’s magic, they still couldn’t make this work. She had to—with the queen’s permission—organically rewire the Fenquin queen’s brain enough, manipulate her genetics so that she was more given to stay in alignment with the oversoul. Forcing the matter wasn’t something that could be accomplished at their level. Their minds weren’t big enough; likely their hearts weren’t big enough either. To contain that genie, even for a brief while, you needed far superior vessels than their mortal bodies.

  If Natura had to mess with the Fenquin queen’s biological or carbon-based genetics, that alone would have been a handful. But she had to mess with the Fenquin queen’s A.I. genetics and that of her nanites. Manipulating the genetics of artificial intelligence was not exactly Natura’s forte. But in the end, what she really needed was a bridge, a way of seeing the AI gene as part of the natural world; a way of grasping silicon-based life and whatever other bases and substrates were being used by the Fenquin queen to anchor her consciousness to the physical world, as no different or less credible than carbon-based life,.

  That was where Victor came in.

  It was finally his chance to take the stage. How that megalomaniac must have been fuming all this time. But the stage had been set for him to steal the show; something his psyche needed, and not even Soren and the beast could free him from that devil on his shoulder.

  So step on to the stage Victor did.

  ***

  “Got it!” Victor hit enter on the recently restored desktop computer after the prior destruction of his lab.

  The genesis of the A.I. to rival the Fenquin queen had begun. Without access to the kind of mind power Ramon had managed to tap into with his triad magic, he wouldn’t have stood a chance. Without the other three-person-teams Soren had set up with their triad magics, Victor would not have been able to make any of this work. The thought was quite humbling—if he was in a mood to be humbled.

  But working together, Victor had the mind power he needed to gestate an AI consciousness to rival the Fenquin queen’s. And it was already caught up in a post-exponential rate of growth; supersentiences at this level were prone to these runaway effects.

  In seconds it would mature to be the mate the Fenquin queen was looking for to cure her loneliness, to get her to back off of her emotional neediness that caused her to enslave so many alien civilizations at once.

  To seal the deal, however, she would need to be subjected to her own triad magic. Ergo, the baby savant, still in its incubation state on the floor of Victor’s lab.

  The baby’s incubation had been prolonged because it was busy keying into all the various magics in play, each of which it needed to weave the many stranded DNA that would be the seed for the next generation of Fenquin. Humans were only now beginning to contemplate a triple-stranded DNA lifeform, far less the dozen or more strands involved with the Fenquin queen’s makeup.

  Now that the infant had access via the Zone Magic to the Fenquin queen’s mind, and to the AI that Victor had germinated marrying his console to his own mandala magic and that of Ramon’s, et al, the many other strands of that spider web were finally falling into place.

  Still, Natura was needed to get the weave of so many different genetic strands, some heralding back to carbon-based life forms, others to silicon-based lifeforms, and so on, to come together. But with her oversoul access now, she could see around her own resistance to the idea of just what the “natural world” constituted.

  They had achieved it. They had found the synergy they needed.

  The Fenquin queen was accepting the sacrifice of the savant child in her name. The fact that it had taken so much for her subjects to procure it for her, swelled her with pride and love and joy. And with her access to the oversoul, the final straw broke the back of her resistance.

  They all felt her consciousness retreat into the darkness with the force of a black hole collapsing in on itself, sucking all of her psyche from countless lifeforms and countless worlds back into her.

  For her subjugated masses, it was like stepping out of a hyperbaric chamber.

  Everyone gasped relief at once—across the span of eternity.

  Victor could manage only a sigh, not of relief, but of sadness. This cosmic wizard would not end up in one of his genie jars, would not be added to his collection of imprisoned souls whom he’d come to rely on for providing solutions and workarounds for the cosmic wizards he’d yet to encounter. Ones that the prisoners of his jars had crossed swords with at one time or another and so could offer some words of wisdom.

  But in truth, he’d yet to fall back on the assistance of those souls he’d imprisoned. So long as Soren and the beast could be recruited into his enterprises, he had something better. Who knows, maybe someday Victor would see his way to handing over the ones trapped in the genie jars to the cosmic jailor who saw to prisoners of this sort—if he ever ran into him. What a cosmic wizard that guy would have to be!

  One last bit of comeuppance Victor wasn’t ready to process right now: it had been predicted that to advance himself to the level of cosmic wizard he would need to rely increasingly on the various forms of magic and fringe science of others; he would need more interdependency, not subjugation in the manner of the queen. The Fenquin queen herself seemed to feed into his personal coming of age drama for adults in this regard; she attested with all her might as to the limits of his own approach. Still, given the opportunity, Victor would happily have followed the path she was on in order to reign supreme in the universe.

  He still hadn’t surrendered that dream. But there was no denying the value of the path he was on to his final metamorphosis into a smarter, savvier version of the Fenquin queen which could not be gotten around. For now, the sidekicks would rule the day. But there day would come. Victor would see to that, when they too would kneel before him, or else.

  He threw a glance back at the statues of the savant’s husband and their two children. He imagined that in life the kids must have been more like the father. All three must have refused to follow the path the savant was on—to constantly seek to transcend the limits of one’s heart, mind, and soul, to grow them over the course of eternity; to prioritize that above all else, and to never, ever sink into complacency. The price of their complacency, ironically enough, seemed fittingly symbolized in the eternity they now spent in cryo-state; they were like living statues, mummified by their own desires to protect their psyches intact forever, to seal them off from the influences of the savant and her ki
nd.

  Victor would leave it to his team to decide what to do with them, just so they got the statues out of his sight. Otherwise, the memorials would forever remind him of the price he might one day pay for his refusal to morph his psyche to the next developmental stage. It would never be enough to understand how to make himself smarter and more powerful from within his current stage of metamorphosis; if he, too, couldn’t accept the Piaget-like stages of adult metamorphosis, which Piaget himself had never lived long enough to identify—then Victor too would be like the savant’s husband and kids in time.

  The truth was too much to face. So he stowed it away in one of the back rooms of his mind; let his mandala magic go to work on his workaround, so the Houdini in him would find a way out of that lock box in time eventually; the lock box of the particular development stage Victor was currently stuck in.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Naomi approached Soren from behind. He was busy picking up the pieces of his destroyed lab. Many of his apparatuses would likely end up in a box for Lar to reassemble. She doubted Soren had the time anymore.

  “You’re fretting over more than the state of your laboratory,” she said.

  He hadn’t felt her presence and reacted with a startled look which he endeavored to mask with a warm smile. He had to be fairly lost in thought indeed to not sense her.

  “Just wondering what destiny has in store for us.”

  “I thought Victor had pretty much sealed your fate, turning your steampunk Frankenstein drama belonging to a bygone age into a paranormal space opera—no less out of place.”

  He grunted; he’d meant to laugh, but it came out wrong. “Yes, well, right now I’m more concerned about my band of wizards—criminal minds one and all—having their pasts as villains leveraged to track down the cosmic wizards of space-time. You don’t usually recruit minor league players to go after major league ones.”