Honestly, if Victor was able to get around this Dark Matter Man—if that’s what he was—Victor would discover just how to collapse the universe or accelerate its expansion. Now, that would definitely provoke the celestial wizards to send him someone truly interesting.
Surely, they wouldn’t bait him like this? If he was drunk before, he was positively giddy now with the implications.
“Wait until I tell Soren about this!”
Okay, Soren would probably do his best to kill him once and for all, but then, what were friends for?
THREE
Soren was coming; Victor could sense him.
Hastily, he made his way through his penthouse apartment, resetting his genie lamps—the pride of his collection—spotlighted and on display on pedestals throughout the loft space. The impact knocking Earth out of orbit had unsettled them. Not much of a show for all the disturbance, but his flat was warded with magic.
As for the rest of the city—much of it was burning; he dared say, much of the planet, too, from erupting gas veins or disturbed electrical lines. It was going to be smelly out there, as well, from busted sewage lines. The blustering cold that was now upon them, courtesy of being pushed that much further out from the sun, would, ironically, mitigate many of the fires and the nasty odors soon enough, though not without bringing other problems; food shortages and massive diebacks of plant and animal life would be the order of the day.
There was still plenty of room between Earth and Mars, which was further out from the sun still, but Victor’s calculations suggested mean winter temperatures on Earth would now hover around zero degrees Fahrenheit—at the equator. More like minus twenty—without wind chill, this far north of it.
He lost track of the pedestrian concerns of humanity as he dusted off his genie lamps. They currently held the masters of oblivion, released by the celestial wizards to put an end to Victor. Instead, he’d corralled them and turned them to doing his bidding; if they ever wanted free of those lamps again, they’d advise him on how to get around the best celestial wizards, as they had, time and time again.
But they were hardly the dream team. The bastards were slippery, and nothing they said could be trusted at face value. They were all too keen on learning how to get around him, too. No, he was going to need a hell of a lot more going for him than these guys the day he decided to abscond from this planet once and for all.
When Victor turned from up-righting the last of the bottles, he found Soren standing there, staring at him.
***
“God, look at you.” Victor ran his eyes over his friend as if he were trying to distinguish his favorite prize Ferrari after a car crusher had gotten a hold of it. “You look more dead than alive.”
“That’s because I am dead, dickhead. The chip… the backup chip… it houses what’s left of my consciousness, my higher self. It’s what’s talking to you right now. This meat puppet it powers…. I have to figure out how to restore life to it.”
Victor ripped the robe with its hood off him, ran his hand slowly over his surface. He seemed most fascinated by the moving blotches on him. After putting his hand up to Soren’s face then slowly pulling it away to examine his fingers, he was surprised to see that none of the nanites had migrated to him.
Soren tolerated the reveal of what he had become, and the strangely intimate moment filled with more caresses, without resisting. Despite the fact that Victor’s look just intensified the nature of the scrutiny. His broad, expansive forehead, amplified the gravity of his already big brain; as did the straight across eyebrows—like the spread of an eagle’s wings; an eagle whose sharp, piercing eyes could cut diamond, receded just enough under the forehead to also create an air of mystery and danger. To say nothing of the expression about the mouth, conveying his baseline of mildly-held-in-check perpetual scorn.
Victor grimaced as he retreated a step and took a breath. “You stink of death. And these nanites, hell, they’re doing more damage than good. Where the flesh isn’t still rotting away, it’s been replaced by…. Shit, those microscopic robots will turn you into a machine if this goes much further. Not sure what’s more horrific, the dead body thing, or the steampunk take on the transhuman thing.
“Hey, for what it’s worth though, you’ll be a hit at my cocktail parties, the fake ones I throw so people think I’m human. God knows I should do better at bluffing my way past the rubes once they get a look at you.”
“Your bottomless pit of empathy is appreciated. Help me with my robe,” Soren said, wincing as he tried to stoop down to pick it up.
Victor picked up the monkish attire and redressed him with it, leering at his nakedness all the while, perhaps more seduced than ever by the mixture of beauty and grotesquery—maybe he felt they were now more alike than ever. If Victor was in love with anything, it was with his own reflection. “What will you do now?”
“Doctoring myself back to health should be interesting with only the reptilian, fear-driven brain engaged, and even then, just partly. But I’ll figure something out. I just need to know, did it work? Did we free ourselves of the Tillerman?”
“You’re staring at him.”
Soren had bent over to take a closer look at the nearest genie’s lamp, at no small cost to his lower back that felt as if it were on fire. He snorted as he stood, rubbing the region just above his sacrum, only to realize it was one of the parts that was no longer human, just rusty. “You really need a better class of friends, Victor.”
“Says the guy who chased all his away. Yes, word reached me even in my self-imposed isolation in my ivory tower.”
“Yeah, well, that’s job one, I suppose, winning them over again. Sure as hell not coming back from the dead in my sorry state without them.”
“I can always threaten them with….”
Soren raised his arm in an arresting gesture. “That’s what got me in this trouble to begin with. People who’ve been raised that way don’t exactly respond well to the psychopathic parenting that you, and I guess, now I, am so good at.”
Soren lumbered toward the door. He could feel Victor’s pitying eyes on him. “Shit, at least let me help shoot you where you’re going on one of my mandala arcs. We’ll paint a fiery rainbow across the sky, just like the old days, which honestly, were just yesterday.”
“No, thanks. You’ve already done enough. I’ll see what I can do working the whole pathetic angle. Might help to win the ‘kids’ back over.”
“What do you mean, ‘I’ve already done enough’?” Victor asked, raising his voice. “Something tells me you’re not referring to the Tillerman.”
“Your mandalas that have taken up residence at my chakras and nadis…. They’re helping the chip to assert itself over the beast, for now.”
Victor mumbled the last part, not wanting to worry his friend further. “Yeah, well, they’ll enhance the monster side of you, too, I’m afraid. I’m not sure that’s one of those ‘You’ll be happy to take the good with the bad’ kind of things.”
Soren stopped as he was about to cross the threshold to the stairwell, craned his head back toward Victor. “That shudder I felt, just an earthquake, right? Nothing to do with you?”
Victor shook his head, his face sporting an exaggerated frown. “Nah. You go heal. You can come out and play with me when you’re a hundred percent again.”
Soren could tell his friend was lying; it was the inability to sustain eye contact when he spoke, even if his words were more under his control. “Damn it, Victor. I’m in no shape to—”
“Get better, I said!” Victor boomed at him, impatiently, then a bit more softly, “for both our sakes.” His eyes went vacant; his expression looked increasingly worried. No doubt Victor had planned on facing off against his greatest enemy yet with Soren’s help. Why greatest? Let’s just say, the one thing he knew about Victor was that he didn’t take any days off from his ladder-climbing ascent past well-out-of-his-weight-class wizards to become master of the multiverse of multiverses.
Just
when Soren couldn’t be in any deeper shit, along comes this guy.
***
Victor’s section of town may have been upscale, but it was no less bustling with activity than any modern city.
Soren passed a Catholic priest in classic black attire with the white collar rolling his beads on the sidewalk, mumbling Hail Marys… then again, judging by the fact that the rosary was threaded with diamonds, and the crucifix was gold, encrusted with even rarer gems, to say nothing of the jewelry on his fingers, those words of power he was mumbling may not have had anything to do with any actual Catholic benedictions. He nodded to Soren as if to a fellow priest, or perhaps a fellow practitioner of the dark arts? The stranger really didn’t slow much to make eye contact, so it was hard to interpret the true significance of the gesture. He did linger, however, long enough to leave a lasting impression on Soren. His face, though deeply wrinkled, was adorned with the thick, black hair of youth, and piercing yellow, cobra’s eyes, suggesting whatever transformation was taking place in him, had yet to complete.
The female taxi driver leaning against her stretch-limo, which she was using for a taxi, was dressed in expensive furs, and leather boots up to her knees, and done up like a cheap tramp—like only a rich bitch going faux-prostitute could be. No doubt she’d take him on the ride of his life, alright—plenty of additional services rendered for plenty of additional tips. In this section of town, even the very rich had to find extra ways to make a buck unless they were very, very rich.
Her platinum blond hair looked white under the halogen street lamps, and her generous lips, painted a vibrant red, to match her boots and leather jacket, were set off further by the pink eyes—not albino pink, designer pink. Designer genes were all the rage in the more modern districts.
She pulled him toward her by grabbing his robe, then slid back the hood. “What in God’s name…!”
Soren quickly and ashamedly redonned the hood. “God had nothing to do with this. And as to why he would let something like this happen, he currently can’t be reached for comment.”
He moseyed back on down the broad sidewalk, half-expecting her to shout, “Hey, for an extra thousand… ,” but she must have been too spooked. He couldn’t blame her, when a mirror caused the same reaction in him. Sure, his dirty blond hair offset with golden highlights, and his clear-to-the-point-of-vibrant purple eyes, his flawless, tanned skin, in his unblemished regions, pulled over the straight nose and lush lips, just a little fuller on the bottom, and generally heart-halting good looks, spoke well to the good-guy-bad-guy duel going on inside him, which had to entice her. But a mound of robotic insects crawling over one side of his face was a deal breaker, no matter what else he had to offset it.
A concert was being simulcast on every street in the district, featuring the most popular teeny-bopper band of the day. By “simulcast” he wasn’t referring to holovision, but to androids that were impossible to tell apart from the real thing, with the performers uploaded personalities. The technique allowed the rock and rollers to play to as many small, intimate crowds as could afford the extra attention, and the chance to get in close and grope their favorite superstars—and for a real premium, sleep with them afterwards; the ones that were willing to pay the front row price for being teased like this. The entertainers exchanged kisses and gropes with the ones in the front row that had paid the performer’s private police, who collected the necessary funds, and approved who made it to the front of the queue and who didn’t.
The airbrushed look of the performers fit perfectly with the airbrushed look of the Swank Town city streets—everything shimmering just so, and polished just right—from the limos that they used as taxis here to the vintage cars and roadsters, to the little islands in the middle of the road, currently supporting the band’s equipment. These little oases with plants that were genetically altered to never drop a leaf or ever grow out of trim, with designer peacocks patrolling with their tail feathers spread wide…. The whole thing struck Soren as overly sterile, but then, beauty was in the eye of the beholder.
And the two female singers, paired with the two male singers, that could have been Vogue Cover magazine fraternal twins—with it being impossible to tell which two were actually related—just added a hint of incest to the kiddy porn that was so en vogue with the forty-something women and men desperate to grab a final taste of youth before menopause and post-middle age erased any last chances, and even the desire for ascending to such heights ever again with hormones alone.
The female and male performers sported looks a little too reminiscent of all prior famous singers before them of their sex—which was the point. They’d been manufactured no less than their songs to push as many buttons as possible.
Soren considered briefly availing himself of such services as an android body. Maybe he could steal into one of the labs, appropriate a body, which he could scarcely afford to buy, and an upload device for himself, until he could fix the body he was in, but the tech was proprietary. All sorts of people had all sorts of upload technologies—but what was uploaded, and what remained behind—who was to say the corporations hadn’t put their stamp on that too? Corporations didn’t exactly have a high trust value in anybody’s books. Besides, it was just playing the game by different rules; maybe he, too, had become too married to his sector’s way of doing things and to sector psychology. Maybe the role was acting the man at this point, and no longer the man acting the role.
Fleeing the madness, Soren made his way to the edge of the district. The street dead-ended at a formidable wall that was just large enough to keep King Kong out. The guard standing before it might have been interbred with Kong’s genes, considering his size and his apelike demeanor. “You sure about this, pal? Nothing but plague and pestilence on that side and the worst Victorian England has to offer. Add to that the vamps and werewolves, as this is Shelley’s take on the era, and….”
Soren just lowered his hood to shut him up. “Yeah, it’s all coming together now. No need to show me any paperwork, pal.” He stepped aside for him, which took several shuffling steps, being as he had a lot of his own muscles to get around. The eyes on the gorilla-like face, which didn’t exactly bespeak brainiac of the week, nonetheless radiated compassion to suggest that in that moment, the human side of him was winning out over the beast he was content to become if someone tried to broach a district that was clearly not meant for them. Needless to say, in that moment, Soren truly connected with the man, realized how much they actually had in common.
The wall proved to be nothing other than a hologram held together with magic, and an opening appeared for him to pass through the instant the guard’s mind signaled “passing approved.”
The district he was leaving, of course, was feeling the effects of the planetary billiards being played on a cosmic level. But most everyone in Swank Town was genetically altered in one way or another, making dealing with the freezing temperatures no big thing, and that included the snow flurries. Few aged beyond whatever years they’d arrested themselves at. Few really needed to eat, and if they did, it didn’t matter how much they consumed, they’d never ruin their perfect figures. Sure, the area had its bulimics and its corpulent, who numbered among the “poor-riche” of the district, the former just pinching their pennies so they could suck all the coke up their noses they wanted, to keep the weight off, without paying the price of an actual genetic enhancement that would allow them to simply forego the need to eat at all to maintain the perfect figure. So long as no one could tell you had any genetic modifications done, and it all squared with “enhanced cosmetic surgery” you were square with Swank Town etiquette. The transhuman look was hardly allowed; if you wanted to get your super-freak on, by abiding of no such editing of superpowers, then you headed to the Transhuman district, or perhaps the Superhero district. “Respectable makeovers” couldn’t offend the more traditional tastes of the superrich. All of which was to say, it was easy to overlook the sudden turn in the weather in Swank Town, as always feeling comforta
ble in your skin, never so hot as to break a sweat, never so cold as to shiver—well, that was another genetic makeover that was fine with Swank Town residents.
Once Soren was inside Shelley’s Victorian England, things were a good deal different. The locals didn’t have self-mending sewer-lines, self-mending electrical lines, self-mending buildings. Any of those structures in Swank Town that had exceeded the tolerances of the nano-tech, whose hive-mind duties included keeping those structures trim, would have been fixed by the local wizards lending their magic to the problem.
Suffice to say, the manual laborers were actually happy to shovel the rivers of shit up in heaps to clear the roads, if only to stay warm. Their noses, flared red from the cold, were also running, muting the worst assaults of the fecal matter against their sinuses; maybe not entirely, but enough that staying warm took precedent.
Soren threaded the path between the piles of shit where the road was clear enough for it not to get on the bottom of his robe, which hung a few inches above his ankles.
The aged and infirm were receiving mercy killings at the hands of the werewolves and vamps, both moving so rapidly it was hard to perceive them going about their business, especially as they seemed to excel at staying in your peripheral vision. Soren didn’t think charity was at work; the predators were saving the strongest humans for last, when their own abilities started to weaken in a world grown sick from being smashed out of orbit. Soren could only guess that was what had happened, of course; he’d yet to hear any actual speculation one way or the other, but he knew that look on Victor’s face, and he knew his screw-ups were seldom any less epic. So it stood to reason, if only by Victor Truman standards of reasoning.
After sniffing the air, one of the werewolves mistook Soren’s current debilitated state as worthy of placing him on the menu. He captured the vile creature—about twice the size of a Caucasian Shepherd dog—with canines that would humble a tiger—and held it by the throat off the ground in one hand, before crushing its larynx, turning its growls and snarls to yelps and ultimately to gasps, sputterings, and silence. His current generation of nanites didn’t make him any slower or weaker; they just brought more pain than that werewolf could offer. He tossed the creature with one hand halfway down the street, where it was immediately descended upon by people eager to carve up the fresh meat to ward off starvation. Soren noticed that kids, ranging from seven to nine years old were gaily carving the creature up right alongside the adults. They had perhaps become the hunter gatherers for their families which could field no better warriors.
Reviled (Frankenstein Book 2) Page 3
