“Mam, due respect, this is England. If anything goes right in a hospital, we assume the gods intervened. It’s more a matter for priests who study karmic retribution.”
Robin chuckled. “America is no better. I grant you, any organization this size, a certain amount of chaos is to be expected. Still, I plan to track down Coma Man. You’re either with me on this, or you aren’t. If you aren’t, it’s going to be a very long day.”
“So long as it involves lots of driving, I’m good.” Toby gripped the steering wheel the way an infant sucks on his bib.
“What’s with that?” Robin closed her magazine. “You’re claustrophobic and you’re agoraphobic, both, aren’t you? Afraid of tight, enclosed spaces, and big open ones—the only place you’re able to cope is inside this car.”
“How did—?” Toby lowered his eyes from the rearview mirror serving as his communication channel to the far-off world of the backseat.
“I noticed you sleep in the car.”
“You spied on me?” Toby’s surprise was insufficient to mask his sense of betrayal.
“You’re kind of sexy, so, yeah.”
“You’re married.” Robin found it strange his conventional mores trumped his unconventional lifestyle.
“Honestly, Toby, the only one feeling threatened by my sexual fantasies is you. And only because you’re afraid of having sex out of the car. Not to worry, I’m quite flexible.”
“I thought you were having trouble adjusting to men. Sorry, the staff talks.”
“As it turns out, callow youths bring out my predatory impulses. I suspect my injured inner-child seeks to fashion a healthier, more positive self-image by worshipping an idealized version of itself. Drew will be delighted to see I’ve found a bridge to him.” Robin was also beginning to wonder if a greater sense of sexuality, to accompany the already expanded sense of sensuality, was a part of her shifting identity now that she was in female form. More than likely she’d guessed right the first time, and her feelings toward Toby was the exception that proved the rule.
Toby smiled coyly. “Shall I drive now, mam?”
“Please do.” He took the car out of idle, and rolled down the road on the spoked-wheels of the vintage vehicle. “Can you key in Coma Man on the GPS?”
“Yes, mam,” Toby said stiffly. “But please don’t tell anyone.”
“I was being facetious, Toby.”
“Oh.” Toby’s woodenness, Robin suspected, was more nerves than anything. He seemed all too human beneath the thin veneer of restricted emotional range.
“Seriously, you can do that?”
“Lady Harding likes to play super sleuth at night,” Toby explained. “She’s got it dialed into the MI5 and MI6 databases. We can even overhear their shoptalk.”
“What exactly does she do? Follow suspects around at night, gathering information for queen and country?”
“I’m afraid it’s a bit more involved than that, mam.” Toby’s wooden emotional range suddenly sounded imminently practical.
“Little ol’, ‘I’m so down on myself, I need to believe I’m living in End Times to avoid any guilt?’”
The corners of Toby’s lips rose. “That would be her, yes, mam.”
“I’m not sure how that fits with my image of her, Toby. Oh, I get it—she suffers from alcoholic delirium, sees ghosts, and other imaginary persecutors. This is her way of making them flesh and culling the herd.”
“That was always my guess, mam.”
“Really? Well, you know, I’m very intuitive—more so since my little breakdown. So you should feel good about yourself. Chin up, Toby.”
Toby smiled, relaxing out of his woodenness. “You really are one of us.”
“What do you mean?” Robin watched Toby make corrections to compensate for the play in the steering wheel.
“Lady Harding collects lost souls, mam. We’re all kind of special, as you’ll find out.”
“Why? She doesn’t strike me as the charitable type. Oh, I get it; more cover for her alcoholic tremens and delusions. She figures no one will talk, and no one will gossip, when you all have nowhere else to go.”
“That’s how I read it, mam.”
“Well, plot a course, courtesy of MI5, Toby. We’ll send them a box of chocolates anonymously when all this is through.”
Toby shifted the car into high gear, and they glided down the road like a schooner setting out to sea, with a stem to stern girth nearly as formidable.
“Can I ask why you’re fixating on Coma Man, mam?”
She poured a soda water and lime for herself from the foldout bar in back of the 1931 convertible Phaeton sedan. Evidently, Lady Harding had made a few other modifications.
“He fits a pattern; if I’m right, he’s the latest harbinger of things to come.”
“Pattern, mam?”
“Over the last several weeks certain headlines stuck out for me. Air traffic controllers at major airports, overwhelmed on a good day, handled unexpected spikes in traffic density and complexity that would have baffled supercomputers. Always with just one or two casualties, enough not to call attention to the superhuman feat of avoiding even greater disaster. And of the individuals lost, three were people destined to change the face of the world. A couple dozen were innocuous nobodies.”
“What a great way to take out power players without anyone suspecting.”
“That’s how I read it. But let’s not jump the gun just yet. An unintentional quake was triggered in a mine in Africa, where they were drilling for gold that propagated as far as Chile. Of the many damage reports there was one in particular that became quite the human interest story. Some teenager with a 250 IQ lost his life when his house caved in to not the quake, but one of the aftershocks.”
“You’re saying someone wanted to take him out? But I don’t think even our supercomputers could calculate a precision strike like that.”
“I didn’t think so, either. Of course it could just be dumb luck.”
“Never say that to a conspiracy theorist. We’ll be inclined to believe you don’t respect our entire reason for living.”
“What I’m about to tell you would make a believer in conspiracy theories out of anybody. Keep in mind, if it weren’t for the Harding Estate’s budget that can afford subscribing to every major newspaper in the world, these clues would likely have escaped me, as I suspect they escaped most people. And the people paid to make these connections in Washington and the world over, will simply suspect the other guy’s government’s ingenuity for fighting a war off-grid by taking to tactics like cyberattacks and tampering with the biosphere.”
“But that’s too simple.”
“Beneath our genius entirely, Toby. No, the matter that sealed the deal for me was the headline about a weather balloon blown off course by a freak wind that carried it halfway around the world, where it just so happened to discover a hole in the ozone layer of our atmosphere. A hole that wasn’t supposed to be there, that somehow eluded our best weather satellites because the factories causing it were timing their emissions according to the flybys of the satelites.”
“Let me get this straight. You suspect a diabolical genius is behind all this, who surpasses even networks of human brainiacs with supercomputers at their fingertips, tasked with doing just what we’re doing, imagining worst case scenarios?”
“Yes, I do.”
Toby sighed. “I’m afraid to ask. But that’s only because I specialize in believable conspiracy theories.”
“I think the Internet has gone sentient.”
Toby temporarily lost control of the wheel, doing a double take.
“Think about it,” Robin said. “You should feel very sympathetic with what it’s like to feel cramped inside a finite space, looking out into the big bad world, afraid of either place, not really knowing what to do with yourself. If I wanted to be freer inside my head, and in the external world, and I was a computer, it’s what I would do, start influencing things from a distance, imperceptibly. So no one
’d ever catch on. That way I could be free without endangering myself, and without really overcoming my fear of small and big places alike.”
“And what makes you think the Internet picked now to go sentient?”
“I think it might have gotten some help from the Three Stooges, or someone else working on their level. If it was those three, something or someone very compelling would have been necessary to hold their attention long enough.”
Robin let her mind go blank to invite the next lightning strike of intuition. “Of course. Why didn’t I see it sooner? Hartman, and his failing mind. Why hold out hope isolated geniuses working in garage labs would ever pull the rabbit out of the hat in time to save him? But a sentient internet might be able to provide the necessary guidance and support for those isolated geniuses, even if she couldn’t be goaded to apply more of her mind directly to the task of saving him.”
“That would be a very hard thing to prove, mam.”
“I’m not sure it is provable, Toby, except in a very roundabout way.”
“By that you mean…?”
“A paranoid might see how it could be done, but probably would only key into one aspect of the S.I.’s—sorry, Sentient Internet’s—psyche. A schizophrenic might see into her inner workings, but likewise would only capture a small sliver of her inner dynamic. You follow me?”
“But if someone, say you, were to come at it from multiple funhouse-psychologies in the DSM-IV…” Toby said.
“Precisely. How did…? You guys really do gossip.”
“In all fairness, mam, there’s a lottery going. Everyone’s betting you’ll go off the deep end again.”
“How much are you down for?” Robin said, smiling.
“A whole year’s pay, mam. With you trying to prove the Internet has gone sentient... Phew! The odds against you ever returning to sanity are going to be incredible. Most everyone’s going for the sure money. But if I win, being as I’m betting on you to make it back out intact at the other end, I can retire, and take up astronomy. That’s an even better occupation for people who love tight spaces and big open ones, just can’t seem to live in either.”
“For what it’s worth, Toby, you’re even better than I am for making the insane sound rational.”
“Kind of goes with the territory, mam.”
Robin was coming to better appreciate Toby’s life, balanced precariously between worlds, as she’d come to balance precariously between the abstract debate they were having, and the very concrete experience of navigating their way through the sensual beauty of the English countryside. Down to the feel of the leather seats, and the intoxicating allure of the polished colored-metal surfaces of the vintage vehicle.
“How far away does it say Coma Man is?”
“A nice three-hour drive through the country, mam,” Toby said, checking the GPS.
“No wonder you’re so happy.”
Robin smiled, and returned to her magazine. “According to this, there’s a Renaissance going on right under everyone’s noses. I could have told them as much. Glad someone else is finally seeing the pattern.”
“You’re hopeful then?”
“Let’s just say I’m cautiously optimistic. Without the power of mind to connect the dots by thinking across numerous disciplines, the powers that be just have too many ways to shut you down, corral your thinking into something they can use, or completely neutralize you.”
“I don’t know.” He checked the rearview mirror as if to determine whether or not to tell her what else was on his mind. Evidently she passed the test. “They have a lot of sympathizers.”
Robin eyed him suspiciously. “You wouldn’t happen to be among those sympathizers?”
Toby got suspiciously quiet. His eyes dashed about the cabin as if he was suddenly paranoid their conversation might be overheard. “I’m part of the underground, mam. We shuttle the Renaissance types about, see they stay two steps ahead of the men in black, get whatever else they need. For now, we just keep track globally of others like us. But one day, we hope the network itself will be global. That’s how I know…”
“Know what, Toby?”
“That’s how I know you’re right about the Three Stooges.”
“You mean you know what they’ve been up to. You just don’t know how to confirm whether they succeeded or not.”
“Not until you elected to do a deep dive into the issue,” he said smiling.
TWENTY
“For the record, I don’t do high-speed chases,” Mort said. “It’s why I drive a VW Bug.”
“Seriously? How do you even fit into that thing?” Santini kept one eye on the road in front of him, the other on the three cars giving chase.
“They’re very ergonomically designed, I’ll have you know,” Mort huffed.
“You don’t even know what that means.” Santini swerved the car to avoid hitting a hapless pedestrian.
“It’s a class on how to be a public menace,” Mort shouted at the pedestrian, who nodded feebly, looking too convinced, Santini thought.
Mort elected to elaborate on his earlier argument. “Ergonomic and egg-heads go together, and I happen to live in egg-head land. So that means great resale value.”
“Reload,” Gretchen said, passing the pistol-grip sawed-off bazooka to Mort.”
“This thing fires RPGs?” Mort sounded scandalized.
Gretchen explained, “It’s for the terrorist who has to travel light, or wreck a city while sightseeing. That’s the Tribune Building, by the way.” Gretchen spied it out the side window. “It’s really quite lovely.”
“Don’t worry,” Mort reassured her. “It’s impervious to RPGs per Oakland’s 1970 revised building codes.”
Santini leaned left; Mort, in the front passenger seat, and Gretchen, in the back, leaned right, as the RPG from the chase car zinged through the cabin, took out the front windshield and the car in front of them.
“Those things really know how to announce themselves, don’t they?” Gretchen said.
Mort handed her back the reloaded RPG launcher. Gretchen took out the garbage truck, parked innocently to the side of the road. The two itinerant garbage collectors on coffee break looked more flabbergasted than annoyed.
“Explain to me again why she’s doing the shooting,” Mort complained. “She can’t stand on a diving board and hit a swimming pool.”
Mort watched the garbage truck fall over and land on the rear chase car. “Never mind.”
Gretchen fired and hit the fire hydrant, causing the lead car to spin out of control and head straight for the storefront, currently in flames. They could hear the cries of the men in black burning alive inside the black Suburban.
“It’s been a while since I got invited to a Texas-style barbecue,” Mort said.
Gretchen looked over her shoulder. “There’s just one car left, and I don’t think we want to hit that.”
“Take a left here,” Mort said.
Santini whipped the wheel, sending the 1949 Mercury sedan around the bend on two wheels. Mort, Gretchen, and Santini leaned left, and it worked out.
They pulled to the side of the road, and braked, their location masked by the shadow of the overhanging building. The chase car whizzed by, then—seconds later—sailed off the pier into the bay.
By the time the occupants came to the surface, Mort had relieved Sister Gretchen of the .44. He dispatched the last two men in black. They waited patiently for the kid in the car to surface.
“Let’s hope he’s just collecting up his paperwork,” Santini said, “because I’m no swimmer.”
“Jump in that water?” Mort shivered at the thought. “They’ve got creatures in there that can repel an alien invasion.”
“Do we even know why this kid was worth saving, not to mention blowing up half the city?” Santini said. “Good thing I’m retired. I don’t think I have the wrist dexterity any more for all the resulting paperwork.”
Gretchen was so focused on the water’s surface. Santini wasn’t sure she�
�d heard him. “I think he’s hiding under the dock,” she said, “maybe holding on to one of the pylons.”
“You may have a point,” Santini said. “It’s not like we had a chance to introduce ourselves.” He cupped his mouth and shouted, “Hey, kid, we’re the good guys. Notice, we don’t wear black.”
The kid swam into the open; looked up, shivering.
“Is that nerves? Because I don’t remember the water being that cold,” Mort said.
“He’s used up all his adrenaline,” Santini explained. “Unlike your other victims, who died first.”
Mort holstered his gun. “You want to feel underappreciated, be a sanitation engineer. No matter how many assholes I clear off the streets—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Santini croaked.
***
Once under shelter, and away from prying eyes, Santini took a closer look at the kid to see what he could assess, and came up empty.
“They don’t usually send a whole team of men in black after somebody, kid. I presume this is pretty good,” Santini said, handing him a bourbon to calm his nerves; he was still shivering severely. The college student sipped the drink, then coughed for the next couple minutes.
“Think of it as holy water,” Mort said. “Chases away all sorts of demons.” He took a swig himself. “Of course, it invites some pretty nasty ones to take their place. Quality over quantity, I say.”
Perhaps it was the fire in his throat pulling him back into his body, but Santini noticed the kid’s eyes got more focused. He sprang up and ran to the paperwork rescued from the car. “Great, that’s just great,” the kid squawked.
Mort grabbed the sheets from him. “Finally, equations I can understand.”
Santini took the water-logged stationary from Mort. The leaves were blank. “I gather these weren’t written in invisible ink in case men in black came around.”
“Can you recreate the work?” Gretchen asked.
“I suppose.” The kid’s voice was meek as a field mouse. “It really doesn’t matter. It’s all theoretical, anyway. Without someone to engineer the thing—”
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 100