***
“Looks like one of my nano clouds that we’ve been keeping around the wizards finally paid off.” Aeros played Bingwen’s declaration before Soren in Chinatown for the team on the big screen monitor in Victor’s lab—images and all, so that the intel came straight from the horse’s mouth. Now that they understood the codex etched in the cipher chamber of the pyramid in Antarctica Lar and Ramon had explored had many solutions, not just one, they could set about finding the others.
The lab’s AIs were already on the job, as was Airy’s mindchip, on which her own proprietary algorithms were running; those algorithms were somewhat more sophisticated at deciphering cabbalistic coding than the lab’s AIs. Considering the pressure that the team was all working under, she made her algorithms available to the AIs, as well, so they could lend their brute force computing power to the problem.
Last, but not least, Airy submitted the entire lot of formulas to the group mind of the entire Transhumanist district—which included everyone that had fortified themselves against the Dark Matter Man in the biggest standoff in human history, with all of mankind’s master thinkers on one side, and the Dark Matter Man on the other.
Airy made sure to make the algorithms self-evolving so the group mind could take them in directions she had never anticipated. The algorithms were arguably self-evolving to a degree already, but that didn’t mean new and far more effective parameters couldn’t be found.
The computer printers in the lab were already spitting out the new spirit science weapons, made from a combination of magic and science that could be used against Soren, or anyone wielding cabbalistic magic—all derived from shuffling the words about within the root codex into phrases that actually worked.
“Victor?” Airy said leadingly, talking to nowhere in particular, since Victor wasn’t physically present in the lab.
“Yes, yes.” Victor’s voice could be heard over the sound system in the lab, projected from inside his protective dome in Swank Town, acting like a womb, where he was gestating his latest superweapon to be used against Soren. “I want to see what the wizards can do on their own before giving them a get-out-of-jail-free card.”
Aeros and Airy both shared a look and a sigh of exasperation. “Sometimes I don’t know which is worse, the Soren threat, or the Victor threat,” she mumbled.
***
Player held out his hand and all the metal on the roof started aerosolizing. The next thing Soren knew, the aerosol was saturating Soren’s lungs, perforating him through the skin. Gasping, he said, “You learned to make very basic nanites…” Soren coughed, “from very basic elements…” Soren hacked harder, “and to use your own mind as the hive mind to coordinate them.”
Soren stumbled and ultimately fell. He lumbered across the roof on all fours. “That way you didn’t have to be a computer whiz.” He coughed again, coarser, even more cancerously than before. “You really just had to gunk up my body enough for my own nanites to not be able to do their jobs.” Soren couldn’t restrain the hawking of nanite infested blood. “Didn’t have to last long, just long enough to make me vulnerable.”
Soren rolled over on his back, no longer able to move, wheezing. “Nice, Player. Very nice. Well, you going to finish me off? Or you going to wait for me to rebound and feel the beast’s wrath upon you?” Soren laughed, however malignantly. “I’m afraid he doesn’t have quite my sense of humor.”
“Why would I do that, Dad?” Player said.
Soren startled. Studied Player. Then he smiled. “Congratulations, Player. You passed the test. You’re free of my heavy-handed parenting, for now.”
Player whisked himself off the roof and out of range, while Soren, fought to get himself back to vertical, flushing the unwanted nanites from his system with each exhale, and each bead of sweat.
Seconds later, Soren was back on his feet again, and opening a portal. To Natura.
Victor, watching what was going on from a distance, saw Natura at the other end of the portal and said, “Yeah, we might want to fetch her one of those crutches to lean on.” He beamed the weapon from his team’s lab into Natura’s hands.
***
Soren materialized in the recreation of the Yucatan peninsula, on top of the pyramid he’d materialized on twice before. So, Natura was keeping his lab at home converted into something that made her feel safer.
She stood on top of another pyramid, a squirrely staff in hand that ran straight for most of its length, but that coiled like a snake in a number of turns at the top. The cabbalistic images lined the entire periphery of the staff. And her purple lion, forever by her side, was wearing a collar—with still more cabbalistic patterns embossed on them.
Soren had to use the mandala magic in his eyes, gifted him by Victor, to zoom in on the twosome, and to collapse the atoms in the atmosphere enough between the two pyramids to whisper his message to her and still have her hear it. “I’m afraid I can’t have you so scared of me that you have to let your lion do your thinking for you, Natura.” Soren held out his hand toward the lion, which leapt at him at the same instant. The lion never completed the leap; he just turned to stone, like some gargoyle guarding the top of the pyramid.
Natura screamed in anger and terror both, but to her credit quickly composed herself. Soren saw the collar migrate to Natura’s waist, where it must have felt right now more like costume jewelry, not worth the price of the plastic.
The beast was becoming distracted from the subject at hand to Soren’s consternation, leading them both off the top of the temple into the valley below.
When Soren’s feet touched the forest floor, he realized that Natura had manifested much of his lab at the foot of the pyramid. The beast was being drawn by the scents bubbling up from the beakers boiling on the Bunsen burners.
Soren took an eye-dropper’s-worth of liquid out of one of the beakers and poured a drop on a slide, then examined it under one of his microscopes. Interesting. Biological nanites—entirely carbon-based; these were more like protozoans or bacteria. They had the makings of substitute mitochondria, or very possibly, supplementary mitochondria.
The body’s mitochondria were a particular bacteria that had invaded the human body hundreds of thousands of years ago and developed a symbiotic relationship with humans, who now depended on them to procure our energy for us.
If Soren were to interject these supplementary mitochondria Natura had designed for him into his body—he may well have access to bandwidths of energy that he didn’t currently. Each of those bandwidths might well come with altered states of consciousness and unique powers inaccessible any other way.
Natura was furthering Soren’s science for him. He considered the peace offering. The beast was pleased, even if Soren wasn’t so sure. Still, direct confrontation was hardly Natura’s style. And there was no reason to force it. Since she’d passed the test in her own way, thought past the rage and hurt of seeing her lion destroyed to, in that very moment, with the aid of the cabbalistic science provided her, synthesize this lab for him.
The beast informed Soren that the science he was beholding beneath the microscope was the merger of alien and human biology that the original slave race was trying to perfect from the day they landed on Earth. Only, they never got to. They had died off after some aborted attempts to interbreed with humans. If they had succeeded, they would have had the next leg up on the master race of manipulators who might yet return some day.
Soren turned toward Natura in the distance, and wove the space-time tunnel between them again so she could hear and see his face in close up, despite the distance which separated them. “Nice, Natura. You passed the test.”
Soren waved his hand and the purple lion was once again as he was. Natura relaxed out of her barely contained tears and thinly checked cyclone of emotions, instantly calming as she hugged her lion and sobbed.
Soren was rapidly getting used to this new incarnation of the lab as a place to work. If it was to be a return to more naturalistic science for him, then working out in nature
like this made sense.
“Not sure you passed my test,” Natura mumbled. He wondered if he’d just managed to squeeze the last bit of testiness out of her. But it was something else. “Drink the potion.”
Suspicious—but when had his curiosity ever not outweighed his suspicions—Soren drank the potion after pulling the beaker off the fire. The scalding liquid would have been nothing for his nanites to contend with.
Within seconds of drinking the solution he felt more like his old self. The potion was reactivating the still-dead regions of his brain, breathing new life into them. The beast was not working to circumvent Natura’s efforts. Again, this was likely part of the new détente period of enhanced trust between Soren and the beast.
Soren and the beast had a lot more work to do on the supplementary mitochondria to evolve them further. But already the pain he’d come to accept in his body as the new baseline was subsiding. Suddenly the cabbalistic nanites could get the energy they needed that his body could previously not supply. No wonder the beast wasn’t protesting; this would accelerate the research he was doing on the alien language and spirit-science.
The hideous clumps of nanites adorning Soren’s body were giving way to more designer-friendly nanite tattoos; his beauty was returning in force. The tattoos themselves were in the form of Escher-like shapes, suggesting the intelligences embodied in the nanite configurations were still hard at work accessing hidden dimensions outside of conventional space-time.
***
Soren had meant to face off with each of the “kids” in his ad hoc family again, but he figured he’d pushed them enough for now. Their desensitization to a prior life of trauma had progressed, and for it to progress further, he would truly need to not have his power checked by the new weapons Victor’s team had supplied them.
Besides, giving them time to try and work with the cabbalistic magic themselves, might advance Soren’s and the beast’s research in ways that might surprise them both. The “kids’” different perspectives on things being what they were. And such a family business might serve well to bring them together again in a way that wouldn’t have the beast constantly looking to muck up the sense of togetherness for fear of it getting in the way of its own agenda. He was hardly out to advance his humanitarianism. Just his power to destroy all who got in his way. His perspective, too, might yet yield insights about the alien race’s many-moves-ahead psychology.
While Soren was prepared to close the book on this chapter of his life, however, it seemed that Stealy was not. She’d been reading his mind, linked to it by way of Naomi, who was broadcasting his thoughts to the others, to get everyone to dial down. But Stealy wasn’t having it. Whatever rage the beast had unleashed in her earlier, it had yet to subside.
Soren heard the roar of her motorcycle as it crested on the top of the pyramid where Natura had stood earlier. Natura had since melted back into the forest with her lion, no doubt to enjoy her animals. Stealy had a different kind of pleasure-seeking in mind.
She was bedecked in jewelry that Victor’s team had fashioned for her, teleported out of his lab. Victor hadn’t exactly whisked it back. Which meant he had chosen to ignore the insights wrought from Naomi’s linking everyone’s minds, or he couldn’t retrieve the weapons. That was Stealy’s nature, after all, to hold on to things that didn’t belong to her, to find ways of ensuring their original owners never saw them again.
She backed the motorcycle down the slope of the pyramid facing away from Soren. As if she might be backing down, after all. Soren wasn’t buying it, and neither was the beast.
In the next second she came barreling over the top of the pyramid, on full throttle. The bike traveled its parabolic arc until it had disappeared back into the forest. Soren could hear her speeding toward him, already anticipating her next move but refusing to resist. It wouldn’t be the victory she’d hoped for but she had to find that out for herself.
She shot into the clearing on her bike, and without slowing sped directly toward him. She lifted herself off the seat just enough to reach into his brain and grab hold of the mindchip. Only her stealy magic could have freed it from its roost despite it being lodged well inside his brain, and warded by a number of magics, the mandala magic, the cabbalistic magic, and the return to the scene of Soren’s original nanites, no longer being actively repressed by the cabbalistic nanites or the beast.
If anyone else had tried that stunt, assuming they could have pulled it off, Soren would be dead. For right now, the outcome felt decidedly worse. Soren and the beast were no longer one. In the split second it had to decide its fate, the beast, interestingly enough, had ceded control to Soren, rather than leave himself in control. But Soren no longer had access to his mind chip. So, what now?
THIRTY
“God damn it, girl!” Victor screamed as the battles he was studying between Soren and the other wizards in the various districts came to an abrupt halt. The different Sorens, one by one, disappeared from each of the stages that Victor’s mandala portals were giving him access to.
There was no point in keeping any of the bridges open now, or of Victor keeping any of his other selves here. He returned them all to where they belonged and shut down every last portal; save the one showing him Stealy, clutching Soren’s mindchip in her open hand before clenching her fist around it. “You’re lucky you’re still under Soren’s protection, Stealy, or you’d be lost in the endless corridors of time right now.” He’d mumbled the words, thinking aloud, rather than threatening her with them.
The truth was, he was seething at himself more than at her right now. For all his observations of the other battles Soren was engaged in prior to being shut down, Victor had yet to pull out the one insight he needed that could check Soren’s powers. Maybe that insight would yet come once he’d had time to stew on the material a bit more. For now, his team had provided them a way to keep Soren and the beast at bay—not Victor—with their cabbalistic weapons. That forced another painful realization: so much for dumping the sidekicks.
Victor closed the last remaining portal, and opened a mandala bridge at his feet. He slid up and over the “rainbow” back to the lab his team of scientists was sharing.
As he landed in the room through the shattering skylight above—already healing—he said, “Please tell me we have what we need to take out the Dark Matter Man ourselves. Because Soren is, once again, out of the picture.”
“Possibly,” Ry said.
“Though Soren would have been a better point man than you on this, Victor,” An interjected.
“No shit.” Victor was already tooling up with the latest weapons the computer printers were spitting out.
Aeros explained, “The others got the weapons we were able to decipher earlier on. As you might guess, they’re less powerful.”
“But we’re a long way from getting to the most lethal weapons of all in this complex picture puzzle.” She pointed to the codex on the big screen snatched off the walls of the pyramid in Antarctica, now being referred to as Area 1. Though Victor preferred Lar’s Latin term for it, Morsus Mihi, which meant Harbinger. “We don’t even know how many more solutions they are to the cabbalistic cypher.”
“Well, it’s what we have, so we’re going with it.” Victor gave all the weapons a hard look before donning them. It was his way of saying goodbye, and thanks. He doubted it came across that way.
And then he was gone, sailing on his mandala arc toward the Dark Matter Man.
***
Victor descended on Dracus’s penthouse flat as he’d done before, shattering the glass in the same manner. He noticed that this time, she didn’t bother to anneal the window pane, just left the shards where they fell to highlight their already sharp-edged relationship.
She interrupted her dancing for him. “Is that a show of respect?” he asked in his customarily test manner.
She smiled. “Well, you did defeat my apprentice.”
“I know you were using Soren and the beast to build you a bridge off this worl
d, so you could unite with a species that could offer you more than we could.”
“This is true.” Her voice had resonances that sounded far more alien than the lithe figure before him looked.
“So, now that I’ve trapped you here, I suggest you take the time you have remaining to just die already,” Victor said, reaching for one of his weapons.
She laughed condescendingly. “I will rebuild my damaged marionette. It is no great thing. But you. How will you rebuild yourself after I’m done with you?”
***
Naomi used her telekinesis to fly herself to Soren in his lab, in the “Yucatan peninsula.” He still couldn’t get over how real the illusion of the pyramids and the forest was.
“So, how is Soren this fine day?” she asked, landing a safe distance from him, not sure what response she’d get.
He ran to her, hugged her, and kissed her. “He’s just fine, thank you very much. Now that you’re back in my arms again.”
“But your connection to the beast has been severed.”
Soren sobered. “A less than ideal fate, to be sure, in lieu of what lies ahead.”
“Victor doesn’t stand a chance against the Dark Matter Man, does he?”
The initial elation he felt to be reunited with her took another hit; the balloon of his pent-up emotions shrinking further. “I suppose that’s left to be seen. His test is to survive crippling humiliation, without it twisting him up further than he’s already twisted himself. His personality is built on making sure he’s powerful enough that no one can truly humble him again.”
“You see everyone’s backstory clearly, don’t you?”
He met her eyes again. “Still just the outlines, for now. But the images come into focus better with each passing day. As they do, so does my power to do some revisionist history on our ad hoc family.”
She combed her hair out of her eyes. “You make it sound like Stealy did you a favor. It’s in your tone more than your words.”
“Maybe she did. She certainly did Victor one. It’s doubtful I could have taught him this next lesson, even if my abilities hadn’t been checked by the rest of his team. Not without permanently damaging our relationship.”
Reviled Page 29
