“Glad that mystery is solved,” Mort said. “Simplifies things, immensely.” He took his gun out.
“I can feel the shield failing,” Gretchen said in a matter-of-fact manner.
“I derive a greater sense of drama when you say things deadpan,” Mort said. “You just hold on to that dry sense of reality, sister.”
Robo-Dude’s arsenal depleted just ahead of the dropping force field. Mort took the opportunity to put one between his eyes. Gretchen knocked his hand away, caused the bullet to stray, and gave the street performer time to retreat. “We don’t know that the AI didn’t just take over the suit. May even be able to directly mess with his mind, if he has any kind of implant. Wouldn’t even have to be a mindchip. Hell, a pacemaker might be enough to do it, if it was dialed into his brain by way of his central nervous system, with enough on-board computer power.”
Mort said, “You don’t know who to kill. Call me a repressed psychopath, but I find that idea most disconcerting of all.”
Santini pointed to the helicopters in the sky, descending like angry wasps. The ones with news crews inside looked frantic, unable to explain why the helicopters were no longer flying under their control. They only relaxed as they saw they were flying right into the best news story of their lives, and all they had to do was aim their cameras at the three people standing curiously still, receiving all the gunfire. Mort’s eyes worked well as zoom lenses with his upgraded powers, allowing him access to the drama of the news reporters in the helicopters that Gretchen and Santini were missing out on.
“We’re not messing up Times Square,” Santini said. “I couldn’t live with myself.”
“New York is so broke,” Mort said, “I’m not sure we can afford to mess up the beach. The bulldozer needed to even the sand out is on loan from New Jersey.”
Santini grabbed them both by the upper arms. “Let’s not get so full of ourselves we forget the basics—like when to run.”
The three headed into the shadows cast by the buildings. The overhangs interrupted the straight-line trajectories of the bullets from the military helicopters. It didn’t stop the harassment, but it cut down on it some.
They hadn’t gone far before Gretchen took a bullet to the right calf muscle. Santini supported her, as Mort drove his fist through a glass display-case with a sniper rifle featured in the window. As to the small matter of the protective wrought-iron bars, he channeled his excess psychic energy to his muscles in order to pull them back. With the alarm sounding, the owner of the gun shop was quick to arrive at the window with a pistol, and just as quick to withdraw. All it took was one look at the incoming helicopters just as happy to take him out for coming between Mort and his troubles.
The threesome ducked inside the gun shop. Mort helped himself to the shells for the sniper rifle behind the display case. “Smart bullets that can target the computer brains of the helicopters?” Mort said. When the owner hesitated, he added, “The elicit ones that don’t exist, you never heard of, and would never think of selling.” He aimed the gun at the owner’s head to jog his memory.
“Yeah, those,” the owner said. “Prototypes. No guarantee they’ll work.” He handed the shells to Mort.
“If you’ve got explosives in here, you’ll want to stow them downstairs,” Mort suggested. When the man refused to move, he added, “The ones you don’t have, don’t sell, and never heard of.”
“Yeah, those.” The man came out of shock just enough to rush the RPGs downstairs. He held a couple up for Mort, “You sure you don’t want to try these? A lot less work.”
“We’re humanitarians,” Mort explained.
“Yeah, those.” The owner interrupted his flight down to the basement a second time as a thought occurred to him. “I have incendiaries that come with seeds to regrow the forest with fast-growing lumber.” Addressing the quizzical expression on Mort’s face, he explained, “Seeds protected by plastic beads immune to heat but that dissolve in sunlight.” He was changing his sales pitch to suit his audience, now that he was getting a better lock on them.
“Take my business card,” Mort said, handing it over to him. The man bowed obligingly, then disappeared into the basement.
The helicopter that had dipped down to street level strafed the store.
Mort fired some precision shots at the helicopter to coax it to ascend, then changed the bullets in the gun over to the miniature guided missiles.
He took out no less than three helicopters by exploding their onboard computers. The wounded helicopters were forced to land too far away from Mort and company to be of any threat. That just left the other thirty.
“Nothing against you precision marksmanship…” Santini said.
“Yeah, I’m no math genius, but I can count,” Mort said irritably. He scanned the street with the scope of the rifle for the big picture. “You’re not going to believe this.”
Santini assisted Gretchen closer to the window. There was a regiment of old people who could barely walk, even with their canes and walkers, some in motorized wheel chairs, making their way for them armed to the teeth with rifles, pistols, some with broomsticks. “Let me guess,” Santini said, “the pacemaker people.”
Gretchen groused, “That’s not very nice. It dehumanizes them.”
“We’re a little late to climb aboard that bus, sister.” Mort checked for a target. But each time the helicopters dipped within range, they pulled up at the sight of his rifle aimed at them. “That damn AI learns from experience better than we do.”
Santini stiffened to compensate for Gretchen as she surrendered still more of her weight to him. “We need to get out of here.”
“Yeah, I’m not up for a group hug,” Mort said, “as fond as I am of old people.”
Santini parted a row of the Venetian blinds. “My guess is they’ll just bomb the store with an RPG.” Mort tried to overturn his reasoning with a “You’re out of your fucking mind” look. Santini said, “You heard the sales clerk, a hell of a lot easier.”
“We might make the subway,” Mort mused out loud.
“You let me and the Judge adjudicate. You can carry Gretchen a lot better than I can.”
Mort evaluated Gretchen’s state. He nodded begrudgingly, strapped the rifle over his shoulder, and lifted her.
Santini was the first out the door, the Judge dispensing his customary brand of justice. He figured with any luck he might just hit a gas tank on one of those helicopters.
Halfway across the street, Gretchen took one to the chest, and Santini lost it.
He brushed his empty hand across the sky, which must have looked to them as if he was covering his eyes from the sun to see his targets better. The gesture exploded every helicopter in sight.
The shrapnel rained down on Times Square.
Mort didn’t feel the incident required comment. A rare moment, which Santini figured, said enough.
They made it into the womblike interiors of the subway, wondered just how safe to feel.
In an effort to set Gretchen down away from any lines of sight from the street, they descended the stairs in a hurry.
When they finally put her down, she wasn’t breathing, and her heart wasn’t beating either. “No offense, but I’m a lot funnier when she’s around,” Mort said. “And this hardly seems like a suitable time to start taking life too seriously.”
Mort held his hand over her chest, levitated the bullet out, and healed the wound, all by just thinking about it. He did the same with the shell lodged in her leg. He shocked her chest; they both watched the lightning flash from the palm of his hand. On the third light pulse, her heart started beating.
“How the hell…?” Mort squawked.
Santini leaned in closer. “Seems to work just by thinking about it.”
“This is real life,” Mort argued. “Thinking about what you want to do is the least of it. It’s everything that comes after that takes a lifetime to sort out.”
“Something tells me we’ll be spending the rest of our lives sorting
through all this. That much hasn’t changed,” Santini said.
Gretchen coughed, and blinked her eyes. She seemed to be coming around.
“I think it was a great man that said, ‘the difference between insanity and genius is measured strictly by success,’” Mort quipped.
“Actually, that was the wacko in a James Bond film, but point taken,” Gretchen remarked, and then coughed.
“Can you stand?” Santini asked.
“Seems the least I can do if you’re going to bring me back from the dead.” Gretchen arched her shoulders off the floor.
Mort grabbed hold of an arm. He and Santini got her to a seated position. “Any NDEs you’d care to share?” Mort said. “Cause I’d love to hear you had a chance to recharge your batteries.”
“Nope,” Gretchen replied.
“How do you know?” Mort asked.
“I imagined you in a tutu,” Gretchen explained.
Mort grunted. “Honestly, the joke does play better when you have to visualize it yourself.”
Upon sight of the descending teenage ear-bud zombies, they continued their evacuation into the subway catacombs. The AI must have calculated that young recruits were better for getting down those many flights of stairs than a contingent of octogenarians.
When Mort’s rifle jammed, he chucked it, and reached for the shotgun in the small of his back. He fired a blast.
Gretchen grabbed his arm. “Careful, Mort, they’re just kids.”
“At this distance, the buckshot probably registers like love taps.” Mort pulled the slide back on the shotgun to ready the next shot.
Santini responded to the vibration under his feet. “There’s a train coming.”
Mort complained, “Oh yeah, by all means, let’s jump on a computer-controlled train. As if the AI needs our help doing us in.”
“You haven’t shot your wad,” Santini said to Mort. “Override the damn computer and…”
“I think I can fill in the rest.” Mort returned the shotgun to the small of his back. “Glad to see the strategist surface in you again. I thought he’d retired to Trinidad and Tobago.”
“Just because I’m a little rusty is no reason to get snippy,” Santini said.
“How about them? Are they reason enough?” Mort said.
Santini glanced up to see the zombified business people coming at them. They were wired into cellphones, iPads, laptops, and Gameboys. “No way.”
“Talk about being a slave to the system,” Mort quipped.
“The AI figured out how to reprogram them subliminally,” Gretchen explained.
“No way,” Santini said for the second time.
“Don’t know what you find so difficult to believe,” Mort said. “A sentient Internet… Think how many cyberfreaks out there must worship her. Might have written the code themselves if she was too busy with the task of how to do us in with the tools at hand.”
“You need to stow those antisocial sentiments,” Gretchen scolded. “We need all your psychic energy for what’s around the next corner.”
Mort held his tongue, apparently more anxious to save himself than anyone anticipated, him most of all.
As one of the business people got too close, Mort delivered an uppercut to the jaw, and a jab to the belly in true southpaw fashion. “Seems, powers or no powers, there’s no getting away from the basics.”
The threesome boarded the train.
Mort telekinetically threw everyone else off. He watched stoney-faced as the passengers flew through the open doors. Then he closed the entrances and accelerated the train forward.
Five minutes later, Santini noticed the train was still accelerating. Said as much. They hiked towards the front of the train, and observed the zombie business people at each station anxious to get on the train, joined by the zombie teens madly trying to hack the train’s computers further from their PDAs.
“What I don’t get,” Mort said, “is why we’re still coming up on the AI’s radar. It’s not like we currently have anyone to protect.”
“I don’t think it likes playing second fiddle to virtual gods,” Gretchen surmised.
“I could explain I was really being more figurative with that remark, than literal.” Mort steadied himself with one of the overhead handles.
“We really need to reconsider this path we’re headed down,” Gretchen said.
“You mean the fact that every time we take our game up a level, so does the AI.” Santini slid the next door between train cars open for them. “The thought had occurred to me.”
“No,” Gretchen said. “I mean, if we’re not careful, we’ll enter what the Buddhists call the realm of the warring gods.” She stepped through and waited for Santini to close the door behind them, soften the noise of the train running along the tracks. “Soon we’ll be so attuned to functioning this way, we won’t wake up in our timeline, but in one where everyone has superpowers and spends their time going at one another nonstop. Gods of war, literally, not figuratively.”
The thought sobered and silenced them as they resumed their forward motion. Mort was the first to break out of the fugue. “Where do you get this stuff?” he complained.
“Books on Zen are available at Barnes and Noble, on their discount rack, five for five bucks,” Gretchen explained.
“Oh.” Mort thought about it. “Maybe I’ll pick up a couple. I seem to be the only one who hasn’t.”
“Lots of ways to change the world, gentlemen,” Gretchen said. “I suggest we take a page from those booksellers. Think of another approach.”
“Like hell,” Mort said, as they pushed their way into the next car, one car behind the lead car. “I like digging around in alternate universes for pots of gold, bringing back the treasure to this world, so I can be all that I can be.”
As Santini strained his brain trying to think of a middle path, judging from his twisted-up face, as usual, Gretchen beat him to the punch. She said, “We can choose to channel the psychic energy freed up by healing the wounds in our past and future lives to different ends. Sagelike wisdom…”
“Not my style,” Mort said.
Gretchen ignored him. “Unflappable inner peace…”
“Who would I be if I didn’t have something to complain about?” Mort countered.
“Work with the little lady,” Santini coached.
Mort replied, “I suppose I can think of something to do with myself besides this paranormal shit, which does make me toss and turn at night.”
“Maybe some limited use of superpowers in this timeline…” Santini suggested.
“Maybe,” Gretchen said. “But I suspect it’s wishful thinking.”
They had broken through to the train conductor’s car, surprised to find no one there, just the computerized dash. “God, he’s like the captain on that capsized cruise liner, jumping ship before the passengers,” Mort said.
“You blame him?” Santini looked straight ahead.
Mort gazed up and saw they were coming up on the train in front of them fast. He telekinetically accelerated the train out of the way and along another track.
He continued to shuffle the trains as they slid over, under, or alongside one train after another like snakes in a den.
Next, they were tunneling through solid earth, and then…
…flying out over the bay.
The snake analogy held as Mort swam the train in a sidewinder-fashion under the water past the smaller sea snakes ogling the really big one swimming by, as if it had just spawned them. Mort telekinetically forced the water out that was pushing its way past the seams and shattering windows.
Santini studied the surreal sight out the viewports. “You’re right,” he said. “Maybe it is time we reconsidered this course we’re on.”
“What, you don’t like my driving?” Mort said defensively.
***
Robin had gotten a lock on Gretchen and company as she, Santini, and Mort were cornered by the men in black at the Renaissance Faire. She watched with the same hang-j
awed awe as they teleported out of harm’s way. Following them to New York, Robin witnessed Gretchen throw an energy shield around the threesome that repelled rocket propelled grenades. Not to be outdone, the self-evolving algorithms, which had them in their grasp, upped their game, taking over the minds of anyone with an iPod or portable electronic device dialed into the internet. It wasn’t long after that that Robin’s ghostly image floated alongside a train Mort had freed from the Amtrak rails and was telekinetically propelling under water. In the span of almost no time, both good guys and bad had taken their game well beyond any capacity she had to intervene meaningfully in the fates of either.
Robin, you getting the message here? So long as something in your own nature continues to resist the psychic boosts from both the vortex and the orbiting plane, you’re gonna need access to more power. As soon as she’d stated her intent she heard whispering voices all around her. They seemed to be getting louder in a certain direction. She hesitated; whatever this was, she wasn’t entirely sure the source was benign. Then again, the beam she’d been under from the orbiting plane had been meant to kill her, and she’d turned that to her advantage. So she let herself drift in the direction of the voices.
When she opened her eyes again she’d astral traveled half way around the world. Before her rose a giant obelisk in the Iranian desert being tended by those curious ultra-light people who had not too long ago alighted on the lawn of the Harding Estate. News of the obelisk had made headline news briefly before suspiciously disappearing from all media outlets. The European underground magazine, Science as Culture, was continuing to have a field day with it, of course, single-handedly filling the void of speculation regarding its true purposes.
What is this thing? The whispering voices in her head had only increased. They were maddeningly loud and driving her out of her own mind. Does this obelisk gather up and channel the psychic forces of the ghosts who have refused to move on to a higher plane and who have lingered after dying? Is it their voices I hear in my head? God knows, the voices had all the character of disembodied ghouls. Whatever the source of its power, she could feel its inexhaustible depths. And she knew in an instant how to access it.
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