Preston bent down and picked up the chain with the marble that had fallen off of Dresden and hung it around his own neck. “God, I love this thing,” he said, staring into the faces of the two men trapped inside the shrunken sphere. He strained to hear the tortured screams of their perpetual morphing by shaking the marble and putting it up to his ear. “Girls, a little help?”
Vera put her hand up to the surface of the tank and instructed the smart glass to create a pulsing energy field that would repel any attempt to get near the vat over which Dresden was draped. And she instructed the nano-water to project holographic images of the doomed world forever suffering at the hands of Dresden’s failed experiment at his now forever unblinking eyes.
Roman put his hand up to his forehead and groaned from the stabbing pain in his head. He buckled at the knees, and Svena caught him, held him up in her arms as if she was about to carry him across the threshold to celebrate their wedding day.
And he was gone.
Lost to the currents of the void.
When he blinked back into the factory, he wasn’t all there this time. More like a flickering holo image trying to take on density.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Darya said, putting her hand on his chin.
“Not this time,” Vera said, laying her hand on his chest. All the girls laid hands on him and managed to use their nano-infusions and latest DNA-tweaks to anchor him to this timeline. Bless their parallel-processing minds for maturing their Save-Roman agenda while working out all the other problems before them.
“We better get him back to our lair,” Galina said. “Time to start applying lessons learned from Ronin’s world.”
The girls began dematerializing around him, taking him with them. “What the…?” Roman said. “Since when can you teleport?”
“Relax your mind, Roman,” Zoya said like a nurse that had just administered an analgesic. Very possibly she, or more likely Vera, their master chemist, had slipped him a knockout drug.
“What about the Phantom? I can’t leave a time-slipping jet lying around.”
“It’s already headed back to base, on autopilot,” Eva explained.
And with that he was unconscious before they could finish teleporting.
THIRTY-FIVE
Galina ran her hand over the surface of the transparent cylinder housing Roman’s comatose body. He was levitating inside, parallel to the ground, lying supine, as if pushing against the energy-field containment trapping him, if only for now.
She threw a glance at the Phantom, parked in the basement lair right alongside the team, mocking them for all its superior technology, a symbol of all they could do, including fly through time, and yet they were still impotent when it came to rescuing Roman.
“Any progress with sucking the last secrets out of that flying chariot?” Galina said, migrating to Darya’s and Zoya’s side. Their electronics wizard and their theoretical and experimental physicist were still struggling with the missing pieces to the puzzle. So far the progress they’d made was the only thing keeping Roman tethered to their timeline.
Zoya took a step back pushing the two sides of her skull together with her hands as if determined to crack it to make more room for her swollen brain to think, swollen no doubt by heightened blood pressure.
Darya, seeing how much Zoya was punishing herself said to Galina, “We’ve all been parallel arrayed since we got back to fast-track our progress acting on every clue we got from Ronin’s world. So you know damn well where we stand!”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to push. It’s just that I’m losing my ability to keep track of the big picture,” Galina confessed. Signs of exhaustion were beginning to show on all of them, despite the ability of their triple-stranded DNA to compensate.
They looked up to find Elsa in their midst. She was staring transfixed at Roman in the tube.
“What brought you down here?” Galina said, the tone of her voice every bit as ominous as the expression on Elsa’s face.
“We’re losing him. I could feel it, even from the penthouse.” She put her hand up to the glass cylinder. In another half second Roman was gone.
The girls collectively gasped. All except for Elsa, who knew what was coming. A lone tear traced its way down her cheek from her left eye clear to her neckline.
“Looks like you have all the time in the world now,” Elsa said, “but find me a solution. I don’t care if it’s waiting for us on the other side of eternity.”
She got no argument from the girls. She knew that, in their own way, each had become every bit as attached to him. Perhaps for different reasons, perhaps for all the wrong reasons. She didn’t much care why now, just so they were properly motivated.
THIRTY-SIX
TEN YEARS LATER
“Roman!” Ethan grabbed Roman by the shoulders and shook him. “By God, look at you! You haven’t aged a day. Though I suppose that isn’t saying much anymore. Most of us look about the same. It’s all the nano floating around inside us, I guess.” After nearly shaking his head off he put him in a bear hug to finish the job of squeezing the last life out of him.
“Okay, okay, I’m glad to see you too, old friend.” Roman hadn’t exactly missed the fact that Ethan’s shapeshifting from one pretty boy façade to another went on even out here. The man clearly never let his guard down. From what Hatter had said, Roman too had these shapeshifting abilities, even if the underlying tech was different. He just hadn’t found any particular application for them yet.
Ethan eased up on his hold, mostly so he could stare at his friend’s face and burn it into memory again.
“How long have I been gone?” Roman asked. He suddenly realized that Ethan’s death grip may be exaggerated by his nervous system still incorrectly responding to stimuli after a prolonged absence from the physical world.
“No one’s seen you in over ten years. The girls have been frantic. Elsa and her enforcers pretty much threatened to let Earth go to seed if they couldn’t loop Alexa into their parallel-array, just to increase the amount of mind power they needed to pull you out of oblivion. I’ve been lending them thirty-percent of her computing power. It was the best I could do. Hell, they didn’t stop there. They’re tapping nearly twenty percent of the group mind, every DNA-enhanced mortal on the planet. And still nothing. And then you just go and come back on your own. No explanation.”
“Trust me, you don’t want to know the explanation.”
Ethan sobered on a dime. Suddenly all his ecstasy in the moment at seeing his old friend again was gone. “What. Do. You. Mean?”
Roman shivered. Stepped away. Stared at the horizon. Nothing but stars. “Shit, is this even a planet? I don’t detect an atmosphere.”
“It’s a planetoid. And it has the thinnest possible atmosphere. Your neuronet is what’s really keeping you alive right now, I can assure you. Now answer the frigging question!”
“Is this even our solar system? I can’t make out any familiar planets. Holy shit!” Roman winced, doubled over as he pressed against his temples.
“Yeah, that’s the full impact of the internet you’re feeling. A bit boosted from the signal strength of your era. We call it the mindnet now, as it draws more and more space-time into its web, upgrading, enhancing, making the very dirt and rocks into souped-up brains with nano-infusions.”
“You still haven’t answered my question?” Roman said.
“Nor you mine.”
Finally the answer came from the mindnet, once Roman managed to slow down the data-feed to something he could absorb with his primitive neuronet. “Fuck me. This is the Andromeda galaxy? You trying to tell me we’ve spread beyond the Milky Way Galaxy in just over ten years?”
“What can I tell you? It’s the Singularity reaction. The combined effects of every human on the planet working with a DNA-enhanced mind that would make Einstein and Tesla, should they be alive today, look like simpletons. Self-replicating nano and 3-D printers pretty much allow engineers to keep up with the creative event horizon of the de
signers. Space warping engines had been invented even back in your day. Once the 3D printers got ahold of them…”
“Fuck me!”
“We’ve got a lot of catching up to do, my friend. The truth is I could use your help. We let the corporate world run wild out here. Mostly so they could show their hand, expose both their end games and their playing strategies. Mostly, in turn, so Alexa and I could feast on squeezing the pimples on God’s creation. But now we’re finding problems even we can’t solve, not without our time traveler, our Multiverse Man. Buddy, we need you more than ever.”
Roman finally locked eyes with him. Pleading for forgiveness with his eyes in case he fumbled it with his mouth. “My neuronet found a way to anchor me to this timeline. Should hold for a good while. But…”
“But what?”
“But the next time I blink out, it won’t just be me that disappears, it’ll be this entire timeline. The void will swallow it up as readily as an ocean’s incoming tide erodes a sand castle.”
“Roman! My God! You lived for the greater good once. You’d risk all that you spawned, just so you could save yourself?”
“No, of course not. But my neuronet has an agenda all its own. And it seems survival is foremost in its mind. Maybe to counterbalance the extremes in my nature it became as self-serving as I was altruistic.”
“Once the word is out, every sentient being, souped up to various degrees, every organization is going to be trying to hack your mind. They’re going to want to be part of the solution.”
Roman shook his head. “It’s not the way forward. Could just trigger the Christmas tree light to start blinking on and off. Who knows to what lengths the neuronet will go or exactly what it’s capable of?” Roman stared out at the stars, hoping to clear his mind and settle his nerves.
“You know its nature better than anybody else. Please tell me you have a plan.”
He turned back to Ethan. “Yeah, I do. Put me to solving your intractable problems for you. Unless I miss my guess, that’s where we’ll find clues to how to stabilize me in this timeline. The girls and I figured out as much when I brought them along with me last time.”
“What, you’re saying it’s serendipity? The problems you and you alone are meant to solve are put there so God can talk you through this, help you to find your way home?”
Roman shrugged. “Maybe. The universal consciousness, the big quantum computer simulation running all this and all of creation, if you like. Who cares what you call it?”
Ethan sighed. “Talk about hitching your wagon to a braying donkey. And what if all you’re doing is providing your neuronet with the clues it needs to continue to expand its stranglehold on all of creation? It may not stop at making this timeline bleep in and out at will next time. Next time, it could be the multiverse we’re talking about.”
“The thought has occurred to me.”
“And…”
“And we’ll figure this out together, the same way we always have. Now, take me to the first thorn in your side.”
“We don’t have far to go. It’s why I’m here now. To talk some sense into the Battlestar Galactica CEO.”
“Battlestar Galactica? Seriously? That’s the best the intergalactic group mind could come up with, some rip-off of an early 21st Century hit TV series? God forbid it was the original, from the late 20th Century. Even worse.”
Ethan snorted. “It’s the name for one of the military-industrial-megaplexes. Basically they’re our SPACE NAVY, patrolling each of the two galaxies, keeping the peace. Forever involved with one skirmish or another. Honestly, if you can come up with a more fitting name, we’re all ears.”
Roman groaned. “You telling me these mega-corporations are fighting amongst themselves?”
“Sure, when have they not? But the SPACE NAVY also handles alien intrusions into our mindnet.”
“Alien intrusions? You know what, never mind. One problem at a time.”
“Follow me,” Ethan said, figuring Roman had had enough of being brought up to date for one day. And it was time to kill somebody. How like the other enforcers he had become.
THIRTY-SEVEN
“Where the hell are we?” Roman asked, swimming upstream of the crowd. Any further away from Elsa and he’d lose more than her attention.
“In temple-loving Thailand, where I’m assured we’ll be mugged in the middle of you proposing to me.”
“Proposing to you, huh? When did we graduate from my begging on bended knee just to get you to ignore my pretty face so you could see the monster within? So we could truly bond?”
She laughed. “Torturing you is just too easy.” They were passing through an impressive procession of seated Buddhas, thinner and more androgynous looking than the ones he was used to, all wearing golden saris, or whatever they called “deliciously revealing monkish wraps.”
He finally caught up with Elsa and held her hand tight to make sure they didn’t get separated in the crowd again and he didn’t have to keep his voice so elevated, sharing their private lives as if on a megaphone. The drama between them pierced the veil of the language barrier, as best as he could tell, from the glances they were getting.
“I thought I created these virtual reality getaways for us so we could anchor ourselves to our carefree natures,” he said, “you know, kind of like these seated Buddhas, not strengthen the connection to the warriors within.”
“The idea is for you to peacefully talk your way out of our ambush.”
“Oh, yeah, like that’s likely to work.”
“It’s a sim. The outcome is sort of guaranteed.”
He sighed. “Fine.”
They came upon a Buddha statue lying on its side, a busty, female-looking, dare he say, sexy one, stretched out wider than a fleet of buses, and covered in the same golden satiny fabric. The stone effigy was hemmed in by far more ancient-looking ruins and trees. The female Buddha was the symbolic representation of the true Elsa he was hoping to help this current incarnation of her to find her way back to. Only, so far, the magic of the simulated worlds wasn’t exactly working for either of them.
They stepped inside the shadows of one of the more ancient ruins. “Yeah, definitely a good place for an ambush,” he said.
A couple unsavory types stepped out of the darkness, one holding a throat-slitting-in-one-sweep dagger, the other a garrote between his clenched hands. They were threatening away in Thai, oblivious to their victims’ clueless faces. Finally, a third one stepped out of the even darker well of shadows to assist his henchmen. “What my boys are trying to tell you is, your money and your jewelry and your visas, or your lives.”
Roman turned to Elsa whose hand he was still clasping. “Seriously, wouldn’t it be just easier for you to zap them with a bolt of lightning back against the walls so hard, the tourists can say, ‘Oh, Jackson Pollock once visited here’?”
The hooligan who spoke English wasn’t sure what to make of his remarks, whether to treat them as a bluff, or something worse.
“Get on with it,” Elsa whispered into Roman’s ear.
Roman jumped forward and said, “Tell you what. I’ll give you something far more valuable. A good laugh.”
The English-speaking rogue translated for the others, who chuckled on cue. “I think you already succeeded, pal.”
Roman made his face melt and sag and morph into a Picasso then a Kandinsky then a Dali surrealistic image of a face, one after the other. His audience was hypnotized. When he finally stopped, everyone breathed again. The three men clapped for him.
The English-speaking one said, “Can you teach us how to do that? We could make even more money as street venders than as pickpockets.”
“Sure,” Roman said. “Just take my hand.”
Roman let them grab hold once they’d shifted their weapons from their dominant to their non-dominant hands. He sent his body nano into them. A short while later they were making the faces for one another, cracking each other up and heading outside into the sun where they could start luri
ng tourists and their hard-earned money away from the temples. The English-speaking one, the last to leave, looked back at them and said, “Thanks, pal.”
Just one chuckle escaped Roman’s lips. “Enjoy.”
And with that the man was gone.
Roman and Elsa headed back into the sunlight to see the consequences of their actions firsthand. Crowds were already gathering around the three men putting on their three stooges act before an opened guitar case, which they’d no doubt lifted from another tourist.
“Admit it,” Elsa said, “you feel better.”
“Sure, I do. But you do realize that we’re guardians of the galaxy now? Our feelings hardly matter. Which is why I don’t think any amount of time spent in VR is ever going to get us back to where we once were.”
Elsa sighed. “I wasn’t planning on just appealing to your emotions.”
“Logic? You stand even less of a chance with that.”
“We can write algorithms that will be able to do everything we can in warrior mode, and what’s more, live for it. In light of that, torturing ourselves another day is pointless.”
“Hmm.” Roman gave the idea serious consideration, while he stared at the surrealistic faces of the three stooges performing across the way from their elevated platform. “It’s a great idea, but I think we both know that our best self-evolving algorithms can only capture the more stalwart, unchangeable aspects of our personalities. They can’t match us for creativity, spontaneity, and pulling solutions out of thin air. Those owe to the elusive way our right and left hemispheres communicate with each other and the way our unconscious communicates with the quantum realm. The synergies escape everyone’s understanding, even our own. We can never truly know all that we are.”
Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents Page 33