***
As the woman rolled over on the sidewalk onto her back, the maître d’ said, “I’m afraid you’re banned for life, mum. We’ll keep the kid.”
“I’ll sue.”
“No you won’t. We cleaned out your bank account. We set it up as a trust fund for the child. And we have the tapes of the years of your child abuse. Guess you should have thought twice about putting cameras everywhere to capture your every lover’s rendezvous. So much as lift a finger, and you’ll spend the rest of your life in jail, assuming we all survive the Tillerman.”
The truth was they were going to hand the tapes over to the police as soon as the Tillerman was dealt with and they could find a cop to give a damn. The police were too depressed to do their jobs right now, and honestly, even the thieves were too down on themselves to bother to take advantage of the absentee cops.
Honestly, the maître d’ couldn’t remember the last time anyone laughed so hard in the Freaks district, not the tourists, not the locals—and this was the last sanctuary where you could get a good laugh. He had to believe some counteractive was in place—some spell someone had whipped up against the Tillerman. And it might have something to do with that voice in his head egging him on. God bless the wizards pulling off this magic; let’s hope the spell takes.
TWENTY-ONE
The Tillerman was lashing back.
However much Soren had impacted him by soliciting the help of Chu Lin and the masters of comedy, from the realms so dark Dante himself refused to ponder them, it was enough to royally piss him off. The guy no one had yet to see, by the way. They weren’t even sure this wizard had an incarnate form. But his magic had no trouble impacting those who were incarnate.
What have you done, Soren?
This is on you now. My God.
He’d made it back to the Victorian district. He was nearly where he needed to be. But that power spot may as well have been a million miles away now. Each step past the tableaus of people felled by the Tillerman sapped the last bit of life out of him. It was the crushing guilt taking him down now. He could feel the cavernous dip in the amount of chi energy flowing through him.
But the happy-go-lucky ghosts were still doing their part; they weren’t the problem. And although the people they were doctoring would find it that much harder to laugh off their current situation, Soren was confident the ghosts were riding them hard enough that they could laugh this off too. At least while the ghosts where here, but what happened when the spell came to an end and they were gone?
The huddled masses in clumps of two and three and six and eight, illuminated by the puddles of the streetlamps, lit by gas, were now permanently disabled. Many of the local citizens had their bodies fused into Siamese twins, triplets, sextuplets. They writhed against one another uncomfortably, never to feel right in their bodies again.
Others had been felled by strokes, their bodies paralyzed partially or completely. No longer able to control their speech, several mumbled what they wished Soren to do as he cavalierly brushed them off him; hell, as he pushed them away.
It was a numbers game: save one or save all, and he just couldn’t do one at a time now.
Soren and his kind were too strong for these tactics to take too great a hold on them, not the Tillerman’s, but also, not the clowns’. But so long as the planet’s remaining major league players had a heart, the empathic connection to what was happening to the people around them did the rest. Drained like this, Soren wouldn’t be able to do his work even if he made it to where he needed to go.
He had to shake off the blow. He had to coax the others to do the same. He risked spiking his still-limited energy to get a thought projection to Naomi. “Help the others to shake it off, Naomi. The spirits—if they weren’t strong enough to get all the way inside our heads—Well, we’ll just have to do the work for ourselves. Avail yourself of their laugh therapy antics if you have to, and get the rest of our family, and anyone you can collectively reach, to do the same. Take the medicine. Or the Tillerman’s going to win this.”
He had no idea if he’d connected with her. He couldn’t risk maintaining the connection or drawing the Tillerman to them with another thought projection. It either worked or it didn’t.
He was finally at the site of the crater.
The crater itself had been filled in. It was a half-assed cleanup suitable to an age where listlessness infected the soul and even half-assed took way more effort than anyone had to put into anything. But no one needed any extra reminders of the town’s bad luck of late.
Soren stood on the disk of granite rubble. The fact that they’d used more granite as filler would help him. The quartz crystals embedded in the granite would magnify the chi swirling through the power spot as surely as the currents themselves. And now that the Tillerman’s hold was weakening, the planetary chi was flowing better. Soren could feel it.
He arched his head and his back up to the sky and held his hands out wide. And he formed an O-shape with his mouth in what must have seemed like someone emitting a primal scream loud and hard enough to split the planet in two.
Instead, what came out was a beam of illuminated chi energy that fractured upon hitting the sky, like the light at the end of a kid’s sparkler at a 4th of July fireworks celebration. Those sparks were now raining down on the entire world; the chi reached high up into the outer layers of the atmosphere, and where it rained down, it fell fountain-like to the ground. The fountains themselves were shooting upwards not just from the power spot he was standing on but from the power spots spread all over the world. That’s how he was going to reach everyone, with the planet’s help, by uniting his consciousness with Gaia’s.
It was working. Soren could feel the Tillerman’s hold slipping further.
Victor, you’d better have the sense to act now. It’s now or never.
***
Victor stood on the tongue of mandala energy extending from his penthouse, sucking the Tillerman into the jar with the vacuum pull of a billion-billion collapsing suns. It was the most powerful black hole the multiverse had ever seen—and it was no bigger than the size of a dime---threaded into his nozzle doing the vacuuming. The black hole’s sucking action, moreover, had been directed in the direction of the nozzle. This magic, this knowhow, was courtesy of The Masked Man who’d educated him on how to play with black holes, hoping to earn his freedom from the genie bottle ahead of the rest; no doubt so he could get a jumpstart on screwing them over.
Victor, not being as accomplished as The Masked Man in black hole physics as the master wizard instructing him, had had to lean in turn on what he’d gotten from Realm Defyer when imprinting his learning onto his psyche with his mandala magic. As for his own contribution, his mandala magic was helping to shape the black hole’s suction along one path, instead of its tendency to pull things in to itself from all directions. And his wizardry, moreover, was countering the tendency for the weight of such a massive space-warping bit of physics to make the nozzle itself impossible to hold.
There were a few other tweaks worth mentioning on how to construct such a device for the detail-minded if he ever got around to writing his memoirs. For now, he was just damned glad it was working.
He laughed and bellowed, “Soren, you should see me now!”
Seconds later, after vacuuming up what seemed to be a dark cloud as big as the planet was round, it was done.
Victor took his finger off the trigger, disengaged the capped jar from the hose, and happily added it to his collection. The bottle wasn’t any more ostentatious than the rest. He couldn’t afford for the Tillerman to fall into the hands of the likes of Stealy by making his presence more easily felt, the housing any more ostentatious. His security was damn near impregnable, but the operative words in that statement were “damn near.” Nothing was a hundred percent.
He took a second to stoop just low enough to put his face up to the bottle on the pedestal and allowed himself a moment to gloat.
The Tillerman was truly no more i
ncarnate now than ever, but he did allow Victor a glimpse of him. The figure inside the genie’s lamp was raking gravel with a scythe—no, not gravel; skulls. He turned to Victor and smiled. The face the black-hooded and robed figure showed him was Victor’s.
Victor yanked his face away from the flask, rubbed his eyes, and gasped. Just trying to fuck with you, that’s all. Yes, your venture has cost you a lot of lives, but it’s all for the greater good in the end. He relaxed, allowing the rest of the spine-tingling sensation to drain away.
Then he hiked back out to the tongue of mandala energy extending out from the penthouse over the city and held his hands up triumphantly. His head held high and his back arched backwards to direct this next proclamations to the gods themselves. What were the gods indeed but master wizards that had graduated beyond the earthly realm to take their show on the road across the cosmos?
He roared at the top of his lungs. Then he shouted, “Hear me roar, you false gods who would dare to lord it over me. In all of infinity, there’s nowhere to hide. I’m coming for you. I conquered a god of oblivion. You’ve got nothing else for me. Everywhere else, all of space-time is susceptible to my mandala magic!” He laughed until he coughed and had to clear his throat. The Tillerman’s lingering effects on the atmosphere had yet to entirely dissipate.
“Oh, Soren, you should have been here.”
His mood sobered on a Mercury dime. “Soren?”
Something was wrong with Soren. He could feel it.
TWENTY-TWO
“Soren, Soren, Soren.” Victor beheld his friend in his arms as he lifted him off the circular bed of crushed granite; his body limp and lifeless.
Victor extended an arch from where he was standing with interlinked mandala shapes and rode it like a conveyor belt back to Soren’s lab, where he crashed through the skylight panes to lay him on his own operating table.
One of his people, Lar, awakened at a lab table from having his face down in a book by the sudden noise of Victor’s arrival, was upstairs looking down from the balcony. “Oh, shit. Shit, shit, shit!” Lar said, getting a glimpse of Soren on the stainless steel slab, his body half charred. Lar tried to make for the ladder but he tripped and was about to take a full gainer to land on his head.
Victor rescued him, levitating him so he landed at the table prepared to do surgery. Victor was no telekinetic, but his mandala magic in a pinch could play with time and space and gravitational flux easily enough. “How bad is it?” Lar asked.
Victor gave him a deprecating look that Lar withered under. The young man clearly had enough self-doubts to not need Victor adding to the pile. “He’s dead. And I have no idea what a hack like you is going to do about it. But if you don’t bring him back to life, you’ll deal with me.”
And with that Victor was gone. He soared out of the hole in the roof the same way he came in, moving no slower. A second longer in that twit’s presence, and he’d have lost it, and possibly any chance Soren had at a resurrection.
“I need him in the chair!” Lar shouted after him, his voice fading. Not thinking it could possibly reach Victor so far across town already, he hadn’t even bothered to finish shouting. Victor slowed to a stop, turned and extended his hand. Soren flew off the table into the chair, which cuffed his hands and his feet and his head upon making contact with his body.
Victor hesitated, wondering if he dared ransack the Transhumanist district, dragging their best scientists out by their ears. But he knew what they would do. In their eagerness to please him rather than risk his wrath, they’d bring Soren back to life, alright, but not as anything Victor would recognize. He was out of moves. “Let’s hope there’s something to this ‘you can’t do it all yourself’ thinking, my friend.”
***
Lar connected the nanite machine to the chair. He checked his watch. He couldn’t afford to be of two minds about flipping the lever down on the wall much longer. Brain death would set in soon. He didn’t know how long Soren had been lying dead to the world before Victor found him. Long enough perhaps for any remaining nanites in his body that he hadn’t fried doing whatever the hell it was he was doing to cease functioning. Long enough perhaps for the mind-chip he used to back up his higher consciousness to shut down as well, if not be shorted out entirely, assuming it had sputtered along this long. Assuming the chip could even be rebooted… . Add in the time Victor took to get him here… .
Fuck it. Lar flicked the switch on the nanite-machine.
The machine was now sending its nanites by the millions into Soren; much more primitive than the ones he had in his body, Lar knew. This wasn’t going to be pretty. If he had to guess, Soren was going to be in a lot of pain when he woke up. If he woke up.
Lar wended to the wall and flicked the lever down on the chair. From what he’d discerned from Soren’s journals, the electricity was mated with chi energy by how the cabling pulled from both the city’s power grid and the power chakra Soren had sited his lab on, beneath the building itself. It was a small nodule where two small veins intersected, not really worthy of being called a chakra really. And it was centered just where the operating table was located, but it bled over into the chair and tank areas and into the tables where Soren did much of his research.
Soren’s body would need more than the nanites to reanimate him, especially as primitive as these ones were. He was going to need the chi energy flowing through the power spot, and the way the electricity was filtered and dampened down enough to nourish the nanites and his cyber systems as well.
The book said ten seconds before raising the lever. But Lar wasn’t raising it until he saw some sign of life. Soren moaned and shook in response to the current running through him when the ten seconds were up.
Lar shut down the power and rushed over to get him out of the chair. Soren was breathing; no more. It was clear he still wasn’t conscious.
Now, this was the really dicey part.
Lar had been reading up on the tank as well. He wasn’t sure whether to employ it or not. But he didn’t trust the chair alone to pull off the reanimation. Not with these nanites harkening back to another era—hell, a steampunk era from nearly four hundred years ago! By all rights, he’d committed a crime just by releasing them into Soren’s body. Even under a microscope, they looked like they’d been designed by someone ahead of his times, alright, as in a real prodigy of a medieval torturer.
Lar carried Soren’s limp body over his shoulders like a sack of potatoes, managing to bang him up some more against the research tables framing the med bay in a U-shape, each time he lost his balance. Finally, he arrived where he was headed, plopped Soren into the tank, and watched him sink to the bottom.
From what Lar had read, water breathing was possible in this solution. It had a way of amplifying Soren’s psychic abilities. It diminished the power of his rational mind so those other faculties could surface. But it also helped anneal his biological and cybernetic systems, making sure each came together without both life forces tearing him apart. I mean, the book didn’t specify putting him into the tank after putting him in the chair, but for a scenario like this, it made sense, right?
God, he hoped so, but he knew he was just trying to reassure himself. The truth was, he had no idea.
***
“Nice work, Soren.”
Soren turned away from his work station on the ground floor to eye what struck him as a Greek God. An Adonis with blond hair, if you like. Actually, he reminded Soren of the actor Hollywood had chosen to play Thor, the thunder god, once upon a time. It was hard to find humans, even wizards, to look this preternaturally beautiful. Maybe there was a hint in that. “You’re not from Earth, are you?”
“No, Soren,” he said, putting down one of his inventions, and picking up another. “I’m one of the gods of space-time. Well, we were called gods then, now I believe you refer to us as wizards—extra-terrestrial wizards. Personally, I prefer gods; less wordy.”
Soren smiled. The guy had a nice energy, a good feel about him. He wond
ered what the halo around him, around the lab for that matter, was all about. And then he realized he was in the tank. Shit, this is some kind of dream or astral traveling episode.
“I gather I’m to be commended for something, certainly if I’ve earned a visit from the gods.”
“You’re to be commended twice over,” the intruder said, setting down the latest doodad, and picking up another. He seemed to be working his way through Soren’s earlier-model nanite machines. They were much smaller than his current-day model. “You and that mandala magician corked up a master of oblivion and his lesser minions—no small feat for terrestrial wizards just learning to play with magic at the most rudimentary of levels.” The God set down the latest device he was examining, panned his head toward Soren. “That shows potential—a hell of a lot, actually.
“But, what’s really impressive,” he said, chuckling, and finally letting go of the piece in his hand, and coming over to squeeze Soren’s shoulder, “is that you might just flush the megalomania out of this mandala magician by the time you’re through.”
“You’re helping me, aren’t you? You’re trying to humble him, too, in your own way. It wasn’t by chance that the Tillerman found his way onto this world. You wouldn’t have allowed it to happen otherwise.”
“It was hazardous, we know, and reckless, risking an entire world. But better that than the entire cosmos. Victor is everything he thinks he is, or will become so in time. His destiny, I suspect, is to sit on the throne of the king of kings for the multiverse of multiverses. Of course that’s a long and winding path. And the rest of us are intent on seeing it’s as windy and as torturous as possible for him.”
“Until he learns sufficient humility. You’re going to use this planet as the asshole for the cosmos, aren’t you? Dropping one turd of a master wizard on us after another; whatever it takes to humble him or stop him.”
Reborn (Frankenstein Book 1) Page 19