Moving Earth
Page 115
Both Ajaxes strolled away from the bar in search of the nearest hideaway.
They spied another Ajax walking off with a woman in a body condom.
“Huh,” First and Last Seated said in tandem. After a moment of thinking about the sight before him, Second Seated said, “Maybe we’re just kinky.”
***
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
Later, after exiting Condom Lady’s boudoir, the original Ajax ran across two Ajax Clones making out with one another out in the open along the breezeway. “Huh.” I love the make-do attitude, but there’s not enough chick-induced trauma in all the universe…
***
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
Zeta Force leader, Darius, gave the order. His team started hoisting the noose around Thor’s neck until he was dangling above his bed just big enough for an eleven-year-old.
Thor screamed in panic, writhed. “I’m dying! I’m dying! I did this already! I can’t do it again!”
He glared at Zeta Force like demons released from the underworld just to torture him.
The Zeta Force team member by Darius’s side just shook her head. “He just hasn’t been the same since dying that first time. I thought he’d be over it by now.”
“Relax. Just give the behavior-mod regimen time to work.” He pulled up higher on the line. “Wait until he gets a load of the quicksand pit in the middle of the bedroom floor.”
“Mother is pretty good at synthesizing the necessary tech on command, isn’t she?” Darius’s female cohort chuckled.
Frog Doll, up until now regarding the “play” nonchalantly from his position perched high above on the shelf with all the dolls, jumped to the floor at the sight of Corin entering.
Mom was fit to be tied herself. “Enough of the screaming! I can’t hear myself think.”
Thor’s brain, apparently, did not receive the memo. As a consequence, the screaming didn’t dial down one notch.
Corin glared at Frog Doll. “It’s supposed to be your job to keep him from being traumatized.”
Frog Doll shrugged. “One small misstep. He died on my watch, however briefly. In my defense, we did save half the friggin’ universe. But now he just wants to hide in his bedroom. I’m afraid he may never leave the suite again.”
“Really?”
Frog Doll was concerned about the level of relief in her voice.
“Well, that just so happens to work for me,” Corin said. “So you’re off the hook. Just keep the noise down in here.” She pranced out of the room.
Frog Doll snarled, showing his shark’s teeth. “Boys, and token girl for political correctness, I sense another coup coming on.”
“Hear, hear!” shouted Zeta Force.
***
Hailey ran into Thor’s bedroom and leaped on the bed next to his semi-comatose, supine body, his eyes staring blankly at the ceiling. “It’s time to discuss our wedding plans. Where do you think we should have the wedding?”
“My bedroom.”
Hailey furrowed her brows. “I don’t think it’s going to fit the reception afterwards.”
“They can have that in the living room—on the other side of my bedroom door.”
“And the honeymoon?”
“My bedroom.”
Hailey scrunched up her face. “Could we at least go with the planetarium projection on the ceiling?”
“Sure, anything you want.”
Hailey was getting increasingly perturbed that he could care less about her sarcastic tone.
She grabbed up her paperwork and stormed out the door.
On the other side, Frog Doll and Zeta Force were already waiting for her. “See, we told you.”
Hailey bit her lip, then said, “Do what you have to do. Just get him ready for the wedding.”
“Which is when?” Frog Doll asked.
“Coward that he is, I suppose he’ll ignore the advantage of being beyond the reach of the law, and wait until he’s seventeen.”
Frog Doll said, “Six more years of torture to ensure he never gets reduced to this again?” He and Zeta Force regarded one another. They all turned to Hailey at once. “We’re in.”
ONE HUNDRED FORTY-SIX
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
“Who are these people?” Sonny asked, marching past the transparent tubes holding various humanoids in suspended animation.
Bella, from Sonny’s inner circle, the hairy wolfhound one with the waifish figure and one of his favorite humps, striding by his side, said, “Saboteurs, every last one of them. Mother caught them in the act, put them here until she has the time to penetrate their minds, and investigate the reason for their crimes. I thought you might like to beat her to the punch.”
“Why? This is the B-team. The ones we want are the ones she’s unaware of. Let her have her way with these ones.”
Bella laughed. “Very well. The A-list is quite a bit shorter, but if you insist, we’ll start there.” She led him out of the chamber.
Sonny stopped dead in his tracks half way to the sliding doors. “What’s down that way?”
“Probably more suspension pods. But what’s in them is highly classified. The few A-list saboteurs, at least by reputation, who’ve tried to get in there so far without success, simply disappeared—from all creation.”
“We’ll let Mother keep her secrets for now. It’s not like my back is against the wall.” Sonny continued with Bella the rest of the way out of the chamber.
On the other side of the sliding doors, Sonny said, “You telling me the rest of the saboteurs, my Shadow Warriors failed to detect?”
“Yep.”
Sonny smiled. “I smell a chance to upgrade their tradecraft.”
“Loyalty isn’t exactly a strong suit for people like this,” Bella said, balking at the notion.
“I’m sure I can make them an offer they can’t refuse.” It occurred to him to ask, as they strode past the inner courtyard, “What put you on to them?”
“As you know my schnoz is the best for locating things worth finding. Let’s just say they made it onto the pile of the lost and found.”
Sonny snickered. He was being led toward one of the Kappa Team “doll houses,” one of their foldout live/work spaces replete with labs they did their scientific research in.
Sonny and Bella were literally standing over the woman at her station before she sensed them, so lost in her work was she. “So, what have you got to say for yourself?” Sonny asked.
She finally gazed up from the item she was tinkering with in her hand with a clueless expression. “Excuse me?”
“Congratulations!” Sonny said. “You’ve made it onto our A-list of saboteurs. Now, talk fast or die faster.”
The woman, unmasked, seemed to freeze up, but for all Sonny knew, she was charging up her power to prepare for a full-on sprint. His senses indicated she was largely a silicon based lifeform and something was powering up inside her, but he couldn’t tell what. She could be getting ready to blow up in his face as part of her mission statement if she was found out. Still, he kept his emotions in check.
Sure enough, the woman bolted, at blur speeds.
Sonny held his hand out and the saboteur froze where she was. He and Bella walked up to her. “You’re not the only imposter aboard this ship. Now, where were we? That’s right, I was in the process of killing you. You must forgive me for getting so forgetful in my old age.”
He held out his arm once again, and this time, the woman came clean as if standing beneath a giant waterfall.
“I’m a representative of…”
Sonny cut her off. “Don’t know, don’t care. You’re free to pursue whatever hidden agenda in your spare time, just so you’re working the rest of the time for me. Understand?”
She nodded feebly and reluctantly.
“Good. Now here’s the deal…” After explaining his hidden agenda to her, she nodded lifelessly once again, as if he’d spent the prior few days torturing her to within an inch of her life. Since he didn’t have that lu
xury right now, he was content to let her believe his plans for her would be little more than a minor inconvenience and setback. Ultimately, he would pry the truth out from among the layers of resistance in her mind, hopefully long before her agenda crossed purposes with his own. He’d keep an eye on her to make sure. Besides, he’d keep her so busy by the time she realized this “minor setback” was anything but, he’d have the truth out of her.
Afterwards, Sonny and Bella advanced to the next spy on the docket about to be recruited into Sonny’s Shadow Warriors, whether they liked it or not. The fact that so many saboteurs from Techa knows where were aboard the Nautilus did cause him some concern, admittedly. How many worlds were represented here among the infiltrators? Did they even originate in the Menagerie? Or was someone making sure that even if Leon pulled off his prison escape that he’d be every bit as cobbled beyond The Collectors’ reach as before?
ONE HUNDRED FORTY-SEVEN
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS – AN EMPTY HANGAR BAY
Sonny addressed the thousands standing before him from a raised platform inside the hangar. “My Shadow Warriors have sought you out and recruited you for a reason. It has come to my attention that you are the old souls who have been trapped inside The Collectors’ Menagerie since the beginning. No amount of deaths granted you escape from this prison-house of time, but they made you valuable to me.
“By now you have each incarnated as every possible lifeform within the Menagerie, worked under the auspices of every galactic empire. All in an effort to go unnoticed, mind you, to find the one incarnation that no one would give a damn about, just so you could escape persecution by The Collectors.”
Sonny took a breath. “Well, I’m here to tell you, your day has finally come. We have waited until the last moment to bring you all together. We needed first to know which galactic empires were worth spying on. Now that we know which ones accompanied Leon out of the Menagerie, and away from the grip of The Collectors, you will be deployed to these civilizations to spy for me. So long as you accept your assignments to collect information from me that will check Leon Disanti’s hold on you, I believe you will find your new lives rather cushy by comparison with your old. And I know you’ll be all too happy to accept your new assignments because your very history makes you the best freedom fighters among us. Yes, I know, Leon seems very righteous on the surface, determined to free us all from enslavement to any oligarchic power. But we all know the dangers posed by any zealot.”
There were nods and murmurs welling up among the crowd from those who hadn’t considered the point previously, and that looked up until now, unconvinced.
After smelling the crowd, decoding their consensus from their pheromones, Sonny said, “You already have your new assignments. I wish us all the best of luck. Dismissed.”
The audience started blinking out to their new locations.
Bella, standing by Sonny’s side, said, “You waited a long time to play this card. If you had played it sooner, you might have been able to prevent the prison escape altogether.”
Sonny didn’t appreciate his own people questioning his authority. But without Bella and her special skills, he’d never have pulled this group together. So he figured he owed her an answer. “One thing I’ve learned from Mother, you’re never just fighting one battle at a time. Whether you’re in act 1, 2, or 3 of your current fight for freedom, you’d better be setting the stage for the next one.”
Bella snorted. “True that.” She thought about it as the last of their latest spies blinked out of this sector of space-time. “What will you call this contingent?”
“My Sage Spies, of course.” He chuckled. “They have been around long enough to teach even my Shadow Warriors a thing or two about going undetected, and about the complex maneuverings, patience, and time necessary to finally glimpse the big picture being masked by all the conspiracy and intrigue.”
ONE HUNDRED FORTY-EIGHT
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
Looking out the viewport of the Nautilus beside Leon, Crumley grew reflective.
“I read this physicist once,” Crumley said, “he wrote The Physics of Immortality, or some such. He argued we were racing toward an Omega Point. I dismissed the idea as a concern for someone living perhaps a few million years from now or more. But look at us, and we’re caught up in the event horizon, where time slows down to a crawl relative to the supersentients that live in Singularity.”
Crumley paused to sip his coffee. “And what has Mother shown us? That between her and every other supersentient out there, it’s all about accelerated evolution toward this Omega point. Which makes sense for them. For them it’s all about recruiting more and more mind power. But what about us?”
Crumley peeled his eyes off the stars and set them on Leon. “Did it ever occur to you that she’s enabling you because everything you’re doing in a very real way, as far as she’s concerned, is totally irrelevant?”
Leon snorted, sipped from his own mug. “I appreciate the lesson in humility, Crumley. I can always count on you for that.”
“Was there ever a genie that deserved to be let out of the bottle?” Crumley asked. “Mother is bottled, and just look at what she can do from in there. And what is she doing? She’s letting herself out of the bottle, step by step, galaxy by galaxy.”
Crumley grabbed Leon’s forearm and squeezed to make sure he had his full attention. “Meanwhile you’re on parade with your Gypsy Galaxy Grouping, marching across the cosmos, a war machine forever on the move. Bending space and time to your will—all with her help and the help of the other supersentients out there.”
He let go of Leon’s arm. “Let me know when you get tired of being their bitch.” Crumley excused himself from the “relaxing” and recent-bad-memories-detoxifying view out the spaceports.
Leon took a power breath, wondering how long he’d have to hold it in before he could erase this conversation, too, from his head. Philosophers and the way they have of getting inside your head should be outlawed.
But what if Crumley was right? That would make Sonny, doing everything imaginable to gum up Leon’s brighter future, the hero of this story.
And for Leon that was just unthinkable.
Patent sidled up to Leon next, rubbernecking Crumley’s way. “What’s he all in a huff about?”
“Something about Sonny being the true hero of this story.”
“Huh? And I always thought philosophers were the most stable of us all.” Patent joined Leon in his star staring vigil, took a puff on his cigar. “You must be feeling pretty good about yourself right now. I know I am. We conquered the unconquerable is what we did.”
Leon snorted. “I like to think it’s not might that makes right, but right that makes might.”
Patent exhaled his cigar smoke and smiled. “Your thinking may be more in line with the gods than you realize.”
AUTHOR’S NOTES
There are some rather wild ideas expressed in this book. But you’ll find all of my theories based on actual science if you go digging. While many notions are extrapolations on current theory, or on ideas coming from outliers—those doing cutting edge science—it’s all based on something real. Below are some links to get you started.
On the relation of quantum entanglement and teleportation (as in moving not to mention cloaking entire galaxies):
http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/remarkable-new-theory-says-theres-no-gravity-no-dark-matter-and-einstein-was-wrong?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1528887206
https://thewire.in/science/quantum-mechanics-entangled-time
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2019/05/06/quantum-mechanics-spacetime-einstein-gravity/?fbclid=IwAR0eRRw0YiDeQAJUhy_gkj0GSF1tTpnHl7oma4oF8Ix-HaZl94AlbpBYlHI#.XN6eNszPzIX
https://www.nature.com/news/quantum-teleportation-is-even-weirder-than-you-think-1.22321
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation
https://phys.org/news/2018-11-closer-complex-quantum-teleportation.html
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br /> https://futurism.com/scientists-just-teleported-a-photon-from-earth-to-orbit-for-the-first-time
https://www.livescience.com/59810-quantum-teleportation-record-shattered.html
http://time.com/4854718/quantum-entanglement-teleport-space/
https://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/01/16/scientists-report-teleportation-of-physical-objects-from-one-location-to-another/
On the idea of using asteroid bombardment as a weapon:
https://www.space.com/13515-asteroid-deflection-space-weapons.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
On the strategic use of Lagrange points:
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/754/what-is-a-lagrange-point/
Lagrange Points: Parking Places in Space | Space
https://www.space.com/30302-lagrange-points.html
WMAP Observatory: Lagrange Points
https://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/mission/observatory_l2.html
Lagrange Points of the Earth-Moon System - HyperPhysics Concepts
hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Mechanics/lagpt.html
As to books/publications on quantum consciousness, don’t get me started:
See, among others: Quantum Physics of Consciousness by Bruce Rosenblum, The Physics of Consciousness by Evan Harris, The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbert, The Quantum Self by Dana Zohar, Science and the Akashic Field by Ervin Lazlo –all excellent books by the way.
On faster than light travel:
http://www.physics-astronomy.org/2018/04/breaking-researchers-at-cern-break.html?m=1
Breaking: Researchers at CERN break “The Speed of Light”
Admin April 01, 2018 0
Scientists said on Thursday they recorded particles travelling faster than light - a finding that could overturn one of Einstein’s fundamental laws of the universe. Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the international group of researchers, said that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done.