“Think of my device as a kind of space radio,” Natty explained.
Leon’s eyes furrowed. “There’s no static on this radio?”
“No.” The proclamation had come from Rainbow Eyes. And it was spoken with no undue certainty.
“How do you know?” was the chorus coming from around the table.
Sage Solo’s expression changed, becoming more sullen. The rainbow rings of his eyes started brightening, one band at a time. He was going into one of his psychic fugues.
Seeing what was happening, another chorus followed from around the table of “Never mind!” Solo powered down, the bands of light in his rainbow eyes returning to normal. He lowered his head to avoid their gaze.
“Moving on,” Natty said.
Leon held his hand up to arrest the presentation to follow as Natty was getting ready to advance the slide projector. “Let us just sit with this news for a while,” he said, sizing up the room. He and his soldiers were all gung-ho types, but it would take longer for them to rebound. Let’s face it, Natty had just been along for the rides. It was natural for the operators working the Coney Island apparatuses to need a day off once in a while. “You can continue the rest of the briefing tomorrow.”
He led the way out of the room, the rest of OMEGA FORCE following.
Once in the hall, they dispersed to their research stations. Natty had outfitted each of them with the appropriate equipment and space to do their thing.
Natty, who had remained behind in the boardroom, chuckled. Yeah, they're going to work out a lot better than Truman and his goons.
The jittery accountant stepped forward with an armful of paperwork. He and the rest of the financial types once beholden to Truman had been forced to stand around the periphery of the room in deference to Leon and his people. They weren’t exactly happy about it, judging by the constipated expressions and stiff bodies unable to shuffle about like regular human beings, even in Leon’s absence.
“I’m afraid we really can’t sign off on this,” his numbers guy said.
“I’m sorry, who are you again?”
“I’m the new chief accountant, Douglas Preston, sir. There were a lot of promotions due to sudden, unexplained vacancies around the time of Truman’s last team builder.”
“Well, Douglas, if you’d like me to get Leon and the others back in the room to help persuade you?” Natty replied.
Mr. Preston sighed. “Fine, Operation Milky Way Galaxy it is. Even the acronym, OMG, seems to fit. I just hope we can find something out there to pay for all of this.” He and the others migrated towards the doors mumbling to one another. Natty heard one of them say, “I suppose we could sell off a few of those third world countries we were saving for a rainy day.”
EIGHTY-NINE
“Something I’d like to show you,” Natty said, walking up to Leon shortly after their board meeting.
Leon gazed up from his work station. “Just the guy I wanted to see. He got up from his stool. “I noticed you didn’t give Patent his own space. He’s gonna take that as a slight. He probably thinks you’re trying to take his place, as it is, for resident tech genius.”
“Me? Noooooo. I’ve seen that guy’s field-tech. He’s in a league all his own. We’re in the penthouse. I gave him the rest of the building. Between the demands of his toy making and his ALPHA UNIT training school…”
Leon nodded. “He’ll be pleased.”
“It’s just temporary. We need a way cooler secret lair. Something less public. I’m going to relocate us to the mother ship as soon as I can figure out how to summon it.”
Leon smiled wryly. “Space Cowboys need a space station, of sorts.”
“Only, ours will be a mobile tactical headquarters. Who knows where in the cosmos we’ll be fighting next? So ‘home base’ kind of takes on new meaning.”
As they walked together, Leon said, “You really see such a difference between Patent’s tech and yours?”
“Absolutely. His focus is very narrow, as is mine. In his case, it’s evolving the art of warfare. In my case, it’s self-transcendence. To that end, I’m focused on the possible convergence points of AI, Artificial Intelligence and IA, Intelligence Augmentation. Sure, our two fields can overlap depending on how you use my toys, but…”
“Got you. You want to make us smarter and better in every way, and you want to do the same with robots. And what emerges from that, the greater challenges it will bring, well, we’ll likely need them to keep from getting bored with all those godlike powers.”
“I swear I still can’t tell whether you’re teasing me or patting me on the back.”
He led Leon from his research station overseeing weapons development into a side room. And to a cylinder.
Leon dusted the frost off the glass on the tube. His eyes went wide.
DeWitt never looked more alive.
“He’s in suspended animation,” Natty explained. “I’m sorry I could only save DeWitt. He was still breathing and kicking when we found him. I asked him what gave him the strength to hang on. He kept muttering, “Space Cowboys.”
Leon smiled. “I’m so glad I still get to give that kid everything he ever wanted for Christmas.”
Leon turned and made his way to the other pods, repeating the ritual of clearing a sight line to the men inside by brushing away the frost on the glass. First Crumley. And then, Ajax. These two didn’t look in any better shape after their encounter with the tails of a pair of Nomads. “So you’ll keep working on them? Someday, maybe with better technology?”
Natty nodded, tearing up. “Someday,” he said.
“You can undo the disfigurement caused by predation?”
“Oh yeah, that’s the least of it.”
Leon returned his attention to DeWitt. “So why are you keeping him on ice?”
“Figured I’d wait until we got on site. Or at least until the mother ship dropped out of hyperspace into regular spacetime. Otherwise he’s going to be like a nagging five year old the whole time, ‘Are we there yet?’”
Leon snorted. “That’s DeWitt, all right. He’ll thank you for sparing him all the boring stuff that makes up the rest of life, you know, living, loving, laughing, and quiet time throwing Frisbee with the dog.”
“And the wife and the ten-year-old son?”
“You leave them to me.”
He and Leon walked out of the cryo room. He stopped beside Natty in the hall. Heaved his lungs. “What you did, facing down Truman like that, that was impressive. Not sure I would have survived it.”
Natty’s eyes glazed over for a second. Just a second. “I didn’t kill Truman so much as absorbed him. Without him to play the baddy, I have to assume responsibility for my own creations. I have to be an adult about it. That means facing my fears that some of my inventions may in fact make the world a worse place, not a better one. And if so, I’ll have to find a way to fix it.”
Leon snorted and resumed his walk besides Natty. “Something tells me we’re going to be tidying up your messes for a while.”
“Hey, a vote of confidence would be nice!”
“That was it.”
“I can’t just not create because I’m afraid of what my inventions will do to the world. If I’m having these visions, it’s for a reason. If I’m to be one of the protectors of the Earth, then I need to get on with fulfilling my destiny and stop using the Trumans of the world to make the painful decisions for me that I don’t want to make. Because in their hands, the decisions are just that much more painful for the rest of us.”
Leon just smiled. “I’m not the one that needs convincing, kid. Just keep talking it through. You’ll finish growing into your new self. Looks like the snake still has some skin to shed yet.”
“Snake shedding its skin... That gives me an idea.” Natty broke away to chase after another of his visions for a new invention.
Leon chuckled. “Looks like he kept the child, even if he managed to add the adult to the mix. To say nothing of parenting the future.”
<
br /> Moments later, Laney bumped into Leon in the hall. They stopped for one another. “Looks like you’re finally going to get your chance to be all that you can be,” she said.
He smiled. “Yeah, for a long time now I’ve known there was something missing. The Space Cowboys idea fills in the blanks.”
“I’m happy for you. For all of us, actually,” she said glancing in the direction of the boardroom. “Good friends should always challenge one another. And we seem to do that for each other.”
NINETY
Natty inhaled deeply, noting the stale air of his suburban home. It was good to be back, all the same. Even he could use some downtime from his wild imagination.
Laney breezed past him up the stairs, suitcases in hand.
He opened some windows to get some fresh air before heading up.
Less than a couple minutes later, he found her on their bed, passed out. The fallen suitcases providing the necessary steps up to the mattress. She must have been running on hopes and prayers for some time now.
His face fell, worse than a soufflé left too long in the oven. “And I thinking you couldn’t wait to get to the fun stuff.” Apparently some humans can go longer than five minutes without thinking about sex.
The next morning, after tooling about the kitchen for a bit, he walked up the stairs with the breakfast tray in his hands.
Natty delivered the five course meal to Laney in bed.
She gave the tray the once over, emitted a "this'll do" sigh of satisfaction as opposed to an overly impressed gasp. He leaned into kiss her as Laney walked out of the bathroom brushing her hair.
“You're getting a little too attached to my avatar,” she said.
Natty sighed. “Just more of you to love, darling.”
She crawled into bed with him, effectively sandwiching him between both versions of herself. He handed the real her the remote. The "real her" was recognizable solely by virtue of having the chip still planted on her forehead.
It just now dawned on him that the Laney in the boardroom meeting and wandering the halls of RevoCorp headquarters earlier that day was the avatar. By virtue of not having the chip on her forehead. The real Laney must have decided enough was enough well ahead of the rest of them.
“So what did you think of my presentation yesterday?” Natty asked. “We don’t have just a world to set free anymore, we have a cosmos!”
Laney glared at him. “Natty Young, it spells a return to the boys with toys era I had hoped we left behind us.”
Laney’s avatar chimed in. “When will you ever grow up?!”
“I did!” Natty protested. I made you breakfast in bed!”
Laney rolled her eyes. “Small steps.”
Laney’s avatar said, “I suppose five minutes of self-sacrifice - before going off on a twenty year jaunt of self-indulgence - constitutes some kind of maturation for the male of the species.”
The real Laney bit into her eggs.
“So, which one of you wants to do me first?”
Both Laneys shook their heads slowly in mock exasperation. But finally the avatar smiled and said, “I’ll go first.”
He was enjoying the romp on the king-size mattress every bit as much as the real Laney was enjoying her breakfast. Yep, without a doubt, Laney was getting much better with the thought projection thing. This avatar had just as much flesh and blood appeal as the real Laney, he thought, groping her.
And then suddenly the avatar stopped. “Those really weren’t war games, were they?” she said.
The real Laney’s eyes went wide and the fork with the eggs never reached her mouth. “You were just making sure before you left the Amazon that nothing could stop the guardians of the rainforest you left behind.”
The avatar sat up in bed and crossed her arms. “Their real job to restore the natural order.”
“I believe their destiny is far greater than that,” Natty exclaimed. “Not just to save a continent, but to save the world. Maybe even the cosmos. Give them time, you’ll see.”
The Laney with the food forever suspended before her mouth said, “You played me just like you played Truman, Leon, and everybody else.”
“Manipulated and contrived to get us to help you troubleshoot your thinking,” the avatar said, completing her thought for her.
“It was all for the greater good!”
The two Laneys promptly got out of bed. Tray Wielder set down the remainder of her breakfast. Both women took their pillows with them—right out of the room.
Natty flopped back in bed, banging his head against the pillow in frustration, only to find himself staring at the ceiling. “I guess I’m still sacrificing myself for the greater good.”
He crossed his arms and sighed. “I’m sure the split personality thing has nothing to do with the unwitting psychological abuse.” He undid his arms and cracked his knuckles. “If I’m wrong, they might not be exactly the fantasy I had in mind.”
***
Some nights later, a truce accord tentatively struck, Natty found himself in the happy situation of lying between both Laneys once again. They tossed fitfully in their sleep.
Finally the one with the chip in her forehead rolled on her back, eyes popping wide, mumbling, “All those scientists on the spaceship... They’re engineers bred to perfect Natty’s designs. Using his father’s sperm. They’re like Natty’s fraternal twins. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. That explains how one boy who couldn’t finish anything he started could end up rewriting history. His father’s legacy as much as the son’s. His final gift to Natty. His testament to how much he loved him.”
Natty had kept recoiling from her the whole time she was talking. He was standing now in the corner of the room, holding his blanket up to him as a shield. But it wasn’t going to stop his shivering, whose source wasn’t the temperature in the room exactly.
NINETY-ONE
Natty slouched in the swivel chair of Truman’s old private office and stared at the wall safe. Did he have the courage to open it?
To his amazement, the dial on the combination lock started turning on its own. “What the…?” he said sitting up stiffly. He could swear he was nodding ahead of the realization. “That’s right! I forgot I had on one of those skull caps too,” he thought, absently putting his fingers to his scalp. “Easy to forget, Natty, considering the last time you shaved your head.”
Everybody on OMEGA FORCE had one. The transparent skullcaps, made porous to permit hair follicles to grow through them, captured every thought, everything seen and processed through the rest of the five senses, and shot the footage both raw and pre-edited over to ALPHA UNIT’s data-capture server towers. Patent used anything OMEGA FORCE did in the field to help with educating and training his ALPHA UNIT cadets. Natty had one, of course, because Truman had kept one on him since he was an infant. It never needed to be replaced; the nano-webbing simply grew the skull cap to conform to the skull as the skull itself grew.
And now, the office AI, reading his mind from the skull cap’s broadcasting telemetry, had translated his heart’s true intent, opening the safe for him.
The safe popped open with a click and an ominous decompressing sound, like an airlock opening to the vacuum of deep space. He wouldn’t put it past his father that the safe door opened to another dimension. Maybe the entire office was a bad rip-off of Dr. Who, only with an office instead of a phone booth as the time travel device.
Another deep breath for added confidence only pushed more stale office air that no amount of negative ionizers could enliven into his lungs. Even with Truman gone, the oppressive weight against his chest, of his overbearing, over-controlling nature made Natty feel as if he were suffocating. It was the same sensation inhabiting any space Truman had been in for any length of time.
Finally, Natty slipped out of the chair, ambled towards the safe.
Inside it was a brass cylinder with rotating dials on its surface and strange lettering. It was like one of those codices in a Dan Brown novel. So long as he held
it, with his hands at either end and focused on it, the dials on the cylinder turned. And it produced sound, like some defective music box determined to do acapella.
It was his father’s voice speaking at him. His real father, not his step-father.
Natty fell back into the chair, slouched and stared at the moving lettering, letting his mind go blank and his resistance fall away. He was afraid any less and he wouldn’t be able to sustain the trance; the shock would force him to let go of the cylinder.
“Natty, growing up I let you think that you were another Tony Stark, a visionary and technological genius. Which is true, as far as it goes. But it’s not the whole story.
“You see, your genius is based in part on certain genetic alterations I made in the womb.”
Natty immediately sat up in the chair and let go of the cylinder. It dropped to the floor as he sat glowering at it, mouth hanging open.
He wanted to climb out of the chair to pace. Pacing might calm him. Pacing might get the wheels turning in his head again. But he couldn’t move. He couldn’t lift a finger. He couldn’t even reach the codex to get it to spill out the rest of his message. What he couldn’t hear before, now he had to hear.
He panted as he concentrated on it, seeing if he could do the same trick with it as he’d done with opening the safe.
Finally, the wheels on the cylinder started turning again. As if his father had factored in the moment he’d need after the initial revelation.
“I mixed your DNA with some alien DNA I happened to put my hands on,” his father’s voice explained. “That story for another time. My conclusions are only preliminary at this point, but I believe your genetic advantage gives you the ability to tap the Akashic records better than most. All artists and visionaries have access to it well beyond what normal people are capable of. Whether it is drive and passion that awakens these dormant genes in them, a sense of a mission from God, who am I to say? But in you the lens is polished even further.
Mind of a Child_ Sentient Serpents Page 68
