The composite beast rebounded and turned faster than the horse could get into position and rear its legs again. This time the wizard flicked a whip made of pure glowing-green energy at the flaming chimera, which caught around its neck. He sent the creature over the edge of the building, until it was dangling on the rope, the tether cutting through the creature’s neck. The wizard kept yanking at the tether with superhuman strength—the man was nearly as frail as Norel and a good head shorter. From up close, his eyebrows, sloped sharply upwards—like the splay of eagle’s wings in flight—lent intensity to his gaze, and a sense that even fully relaxed, his face would never lose that perennially guarded look; this man was always on the lookout for danger; his face betrayed as much. His short black hair, and nearly black eyes—at least in this light—indicated a man in his twenties or thirties.
No doubt Augustus was another one fleeing the Chinatown district where far too many of the most powerful wizards holed up. Sometimes survival meant finding a less competitive niche, even one you weren’t particularly suited for.
Each time the wizard yanked at the energy-whip, it cut into the chimera’s neck a little more. A few more tugs and he might well decapitate the creature. But it wasn’t waiting around for that to happen. It was looking for traction with its paws against the building, and using its own weight to swing the pendulum to where it could get some purchase. Norel jumped off the horse, reached for his crossbow, and loaded a canister-tipped arrow filled with one of his gene-altering cocktails. He had anticipated someone fucking with either the werewolves or the vamps in the district—they were the most obvious threats. Or possibly with the humans—hoping to turn more of them into vamps and werewolves. Whichever way the Dark Matter Man went, Norel had wanted to be ready for him, should he try anything in Norel’s district. The cocktail was meant to incapacitate morphing of any kind.
Each time the chimera obtained a grip with its paws against the pillars of the building, Norel thwacked it with another arrow, just hard enough for the plunger attached to the canister to inject its contents into the creature; the plunger itself a bit of a steampunk brainchild as mechanical contraptions went, able to apply hydraulic pressure.
Each time the chimera took an arrow to the brain, neck, or torso, it fumbled in its climb back up the building and dangled at the edge of the rope, its paws flailing harmlessly as if it were trying to tread water, or perhaps fan its underside.
By the third arrow, the wizard’s magic had done the rest, severing the creature’s head. Both body parts fell to the street below.
Augustus and Norel stood at the very lip of the flat, their toes dangling over nothing but air, refusing to move from the spot until they were sure that thing wasn’t getting up again. A few seconds later, they both sighed relief. “Xièxiè!” August said, Mandarin for “thank you,” panning his head toward his new friend.
Norel bowed to him in the way of the Chinese. “How long has this been going on?”
“Night and day, within hours of the arrival of the Dark Matter Man.”
Norel nodded, his eyes unfocused, as he considered the implications. “If this pattern holds, the Dark Matter Man is going after the master wizards in each district, perhaps because you are the only real threats to him. That, or just the opposite. His world, functioning more by scientific laws, which are more like magic on this world, means he understands you better than he understands the rest of his opponents. So, he’s taking out who he can take out of his rivals for now, and will widen the circle as he masters the other disciplines.”
Norel focused his eyes on Augustus again. “Either way, you should go into hiding. Stay on the move. Mask your scent with your magic. If he can’t track you, he can’t kill you. And if he can track you, the beasts he employs to hunt you down may well be taken out by other hunters before they get to you; providing you don’t make it too easy on the predators to find you and force them to navigate a gauntlet of our best hunters. I will alert them of the game that’s afoot, elicit their cooperation. It shouldn’t take much.”
Augustus nodded. “I heard that you Frankenstein’s monsters and the Doctors that created you, and the ones like you that are one and the same, were the intellectuals of the district. I should have thought to come to you earlier.”
“Some of us might just as easily turn our penchant for experimenting on you, so it’s perhaps wise you got a better lay of the land first, and who you’re dealing with. And not all the Frankenstein’s monsters are smart—some are just brutes—killing machines; they may be hard to stop if they’re coming at you, even for a wizard. They’re engineered to stand their own against werewolves and vamps, after all.”
Augustus nodded and bowed repeatedly to pay his respects to Norel, who jumped back on his mount. The horse was only too happy to step up to the edge of the overlook itself, its front hooves meeting the very seam of the building, so it could enjoy the spoils of its labors as well. It gave a final neigh of satisfaction.
Norel had no idea how he was going to get a horse in and out of his basement home, but he was determined to keep him. The supply doors, you fool! You can go in and out that way. Maybe you can build it some armor and genetically modify it some more to hold its own even better against those werewolves and vamps.
Norel galloped down the steps the way he’d come. He had to get to some of the other districts to see if there was anything to his theory behind the true motives of the Dark Matter Man. Not just to confirm his own notions, but to qualify them; he may still not have the whole picture. And then he needed to get the information back to Soren.
TWELVE
Some artist from the Steampunk district and Victor Truman had teamed up once upon a time to give each sector more real estate, so it could accommodate the upswell of people from around the world who wanted access to sectors that, for now at least, only existed in Syracuse, New York. As a result, the hum of the mechanical monster, making more buildings suitable to the various sectors was a constant noise; the contraption functioned like modern day computer printers spitting out homes in China, only, of course, it had been built by more primitive means. Victor’s part amounted to lending his mandala magic to warping space-time locally, so each time a building got made, the space opened up to accommodate it. All of which was to say, Norel’s new horse was going to come in handier by the day, as walking from district to district became increasingly impractical.
For now, though, as he traipsed through the Transhumanist sector on his steed, he did feel a bit ridiculous. Say one thing for the horse, he refused to be any more spooked by the air cars, the Silver Surfers zinging by on their hoverboards, and the Rocket Men—some flying around in their Iron Man suits—than he was by a flaming chimera. Norel was beginning to think someone had figured out how to clone King Arthur’s war horse; by comparison, the idea of a watered-down blood line that led back to the original was starting to seem like the less likely proposition.
“Soren?” One of the transhumanists of the district had mistaken him for Soren in the robe.
Norel slipped back the hood to dissuade him of such notions. “No. What’s going on here?”
“The only people immune to the effects of the Dark Matter Man are the residents of Atlantis, who are quarantined inside there. Communications has been shut down between that building and the rest of the sector. Look for yourself; it’s getting ugly out here.”
Ordinarily, transhumans didn’t bother giving humans the time of day; their minds, functioning at much higher levels—they just didn’t have the patience to broach the barrier trying to communicate with an un-upgraded mortal. It would have been like a Parisian trying to communicate with an American in Paris who could only mumble a few words in French.
But this one didn’t have a drop of condescension in his voice when he answered Norel. The Frankensteins were known as intellectuals, after all, and his enlarged head said a lot, too. Besides, who was he to question someone’s evolutionary approach to the species when no two people in the Transhumanist district wer
e using the same formula toward the same end?
Norel was too busy processing the latest information to look all that closely at what was going on in the district. If what this guy said was true, then the Dark Matter Man wanted access to the world’s best scientists and the jacked-up scientific acumen of the transhumanists in particular. That fact alone still didn’t clarify which the Dark Matter Man was more afraid of, science or magic, but it suggested that this much of Norel’s theory was correct.
Norel came out of his self-imposed fugue, which had lasted no more than a few seconds, to take the transhumanist talking to him up on his dare to scrutinize his surroundings better. The fella, in truth, wasn’t a fella, but both sexes in one; like so many transhumanists, he’d learned to change sex at will, and, often, while making love. The en vogue technical term was Genetically Modified Transsexualist or GMT. Transhumanists didn’t go in for boundaries which couldn’t be crossed, as a rule; this line in the sand was no exception. He was morphing now to accommodate his girlfriend, who was clearly lesbian, as she sailed into her arms and kissed her—now that he was a she. “How are you holding up?” she asked the girlfriend just arriving on the scene.
“You’re lucky you can still morph. I’ve lost the ability. And I’ve also lost access to my warp drive.”
“Warp drive?” Norel asked, sliding off the horse.
Perma-Femme replied, “Some of us have mindchips that communicate with the internet at light speed, and process information at the same rate. The intel is then choked down the gradually smaller pipes into smaller, leaner packets of information that our biological brains can make sense of. It’s what passes for intuition in this sector.”
Norel nodded, his eyes vacant again, trying to fit the latest puzzle piece with the rest of the data he’d collected. “It’s possible the Dark Matter Man is seeking leverage; those of you who want access to your higher abilities can have them—providing you put yourselves at his service.”
The two transsexualists grunted and regarded one another as they put this through their remaining filters. “If that’s the case,” Perma-Femme said, shifting her attention back to Norel, “I predict quite the cult forming around him. Most of us can’t stand to unplug for very long. It feels like being deathly ill to us. Many have suicided when told their bodies were starting to reject the implants and that the rejection process couldn’t be halted with available tech.”
Norel sighed. There were indeed local citizens buying anti-mag-lev shoes, from venders on the street, just so they could step into traffic where mag-lev cars and buses moved at blur speeds, only coming to a stop for passengers to embark and disembark. The remaining traffic availing themselves of their auto-navs and auto-piloting AIs corrected on a dime and steered around the suddenly stalled cars. The mag-lev shoes must also have blinded the traffic to the presence of humans on the street, allowing the wearers both traction to walk out in front of the flow and to be exploded like water balloons on impact. “I see your kind isn’t prone to exaggeration,” Norel said, his somber tone covering what might otherwise have come across as a callous quip.
The exploded bodies blown to the sides of the traffic lanes revealed a lot about the ones that had suicided, which a cursory glance at them on the streets would not have revealed. One guy had had half his brain replaced by a silicon, metallic-looking left hemisphere. Another one exploded into a cloud of nanites that continued to hover in the air, the group mind uncertain what to do with itself, until a droid street sweeper repurposed it to join the cleanup brigade, mopping up spilled guts and blood.
One citizen got his skin suit peeled off him and much of his flesh, only to reveal the titanium alloy skeleton and the half a brain that was also artificial. Feeling no less dead than a moment ago, the Undercarriage Man hiked back to the venders on the street and paid for a bottle with a light pulse emitted from his fingertip that would have transferred the funds automatically from his bank account to the vender’s. He then poured the chemical over himself, and dissolved rapidly into a puddle of silver.
The venders selling “the solutions” came across less like callous bastards and more like priests administering last rites with their empathetic expressions and their ritualistic behaviors and rehearsed tones—the way mortuary salesmen talked to people shopping for caskets for a recently lost loved one.
“You could consider the Abu Dhabi fix,” the “mortuary salesman” in earshot of Norel said to his latest customer. “Customers find it fosters a post-death serenity that facilitates walking into the white light—according to our psychics, anyway.” He pointed to one such psychic at his elongated table full of sales items, tracking the “dearly departed” in her crystal ball.
Norel sighed. “You should parallel array your minds,” Norel suggested, turning back to the couple that had been gracious enough to stop and answer his questions. “Continue to recruit more into your numbers. Have a portion of the group-mind upgrade security measures to make the collective more hackproof, and commit the rest of the hive mind to making up for the lost processing speeds that limited access to the warp drive mindchips brings. You might even be able to figure out how to bring them back on line. And the unique countermeasures each person keeps for themselves, not shared with the group mind, may well frustrate further attacks by The Dark Matter Man, or at least slow them.”
The lesbian Perma-Femme and her lover regarded one another, processing how one another felt about the idea with mutually shared glances and expressions, and possibly radio-transmitted thoughts back and forth from chip to chip—even if warp drive access had been shut down—and then turned back to him. “It’s a good idea,” Perma-Femme admitted.
Her lover added, “It’ll buy us some time at least for Soren and Victor to come up with something. Or possibly for those of us trapped inside Atlantis to….”
“I wouldn’t count on them,” Norel said. “They have either been neutralized or already recruited to assisting the Dark Matter Man. If they are the most upgraded of you, they may also have the most to lose by sacrificing their connections to their upgrades, so were the easiest to leverage.”
Norel climbed back on the horse and headed back the way he came. He wanted to check on at least one more district. Two examples didn’t make a pattern; but three did.
THIRTEEN
Player surveyed his new digs—on the second story of Soren’s building. The good news was it spanned half the warehouse, minus Soren’s section, of course, where he’d made off with some of the flooring to clear a way to his skylights. But Christ, the basement of the Excelsior was a palace by comparison.
One of the support beams was lying on the floor. The part of the ceiling it had been holding up was—needless to say—now gone, and what remained was a gaping hole that might well do for launching weather balloons. Courtesy of the open invitation, there were owls nesting amid the rafters and dug into the holes high up along the two-foot thick walls where the stonework had fallen away. The owls were cool. They could stay. They stared at him with those big eyes as if they were passing judgement on his every action; something his father never did. He had been less concerned with how Player turned out and more interested on beating on him for sport.
Player stirred the air with his wind magic and whipped the support beam back into place. He patched the hole with the fallen stone and mortar, courtesy of his earth element magic—after he set the spare window panes against the wall, meant for the side windows, into a newly made skylight. He left a gaping hole in the wall high up for the owls to fly in and out of. For now, he used the cavity to flush the decades of dust out of the loft space, making himself gag and cough in the process. The owls cooed every one of his stunts. He rather liked the instant approval—if that’s what it was.
Now that he had the place cleaned up, with the arched windows along the east and west walls, and the big empty space, his new home looked a bit like a church awaiting its pews and an altar. He was going to have to fix that. The only false god anyone was going to be worshipping in here w
as going to be him. The lack of furnishings meant his personality wasn’t easily felt, but more to the point, it made him feel like he had no personality; more so as nothing came immediately to mind with which to fill the empty space. He’d better start checking out interior decorating magazines, so he could at least fake having depth of character by his wide-ranging choice of décor. It was true what they said about him—he really was just a one-note “worship me” aching need welling up from the center of his soul. It was bad enough when others saw it; he sure as hell didn’t want to be reminded of it every time he stepped into this room. He was going to have to fill it up with stuff soon—any stuff—just so he wasn’t staring at the emptiness he felt inside him every day.
“Player!” Natura shouted from across the hall. She had taken possession of the other loft upstairs.
“Player!” Stealy shouted from downstairs. She’d taken up the entire downstairs, which included both loft spaces with the wall between them collapsed prior to their getting here.
“Let me guess,” he mumbled, in a whiny girlish tone, “Player, could you vacuum out the dust for me?”
“Player, hose out this dive, you useless piece of shit! It won’t kill you to do something purposeful for once,” he said, mocking Stealy’s tone of voice.
Player sighed. “The higher they are, the further they fall. You were a god once. Now you’re just the elemental wizard turned kick-ass janitor.”
“Player!” Natura shouted even louder in some eardrum-piercing pitch only women could reach, shattering one of the panes in his “church windows” facing the street.
“Player, God damn it!” Stealy shouted, taking it up in volume instead of octaves. “Don’t make me burn a hole in your floor just to get you to come down here!”
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