Felicia ignored his empty levity and lowered the railing on the right side of the bed for herself, and climbed off the mattress.
“That’s really not advisable, Miss. Winthrop. I’m afraid I really must insist.” He reached over to restrain her. His arm never met hers. Instead, he buckled at the knees onto the floor. He looked into her eyes and there saw the black abyss other men had fallen into before. And he seemed to know she was the cause of his sudden malaise. “How…?” He tried to finish the sentence, but couldn’t.
“The same way I walked away from an ice pick to the brain. I’m able to sync my medulla oblongata to yours, and coordinate both our sympathetic nervous systems. It allows me to react to changing situations faster than my higher brain can react.”
She touched his shoulder in a calming gesture, mocking his bedside manner. “I’m sorry, doctor, but I can’t have you speaking your mind. You’ll be paralyzed, unable to write or speak. I hope you can adjust to a life of silence, and being waited on hand and foot. You’ve certainly earned it for all your hard work caring for others.”
There were footsteps coming down the hall. It was time to leave.
She finished dressing, and left Dr. Feldman, who was no doubt pondering the cruel vicissitudes of life.
She couldn’t afford to worry about him, anymore; she had bigger fish to fry. The Eternal had found her. An unnecessary complication of her life she was hoping to avoid. The good news was, he thought she was dead. That gave her plenty of time to decide what to do about him. Maybe nothing. She had her assignments, which took priority, after all. Still, next time they bumped into one another, she might not be so lucky. She would need a plan.
She puzzled for a second over what had caused her would-be assassin to betray his own people. She supposed he’d lived long enough to develop a conscience. Time was a luxury she didn’t have. Her amped up autonomic system was busy fighting off the most lethal virus known to man; it mutated about ten times as readily as the AIDS virus. She had yet to get to the bottom of how she’d come by the virus. If, in fact, it wasn’t an assassination attempt against her, or just dumb luck, being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Soon, her autonomic system would be too overloaded defending her to be much of a weapon. Having that virus at her disposal, and under her control, might be the only weapon she had at her disposal besides guile, if she could limit its communicability to no more than her intended target. The quest to tame the virus had become a moonlighting project. It would have to become her day job, and the odd kill for the men in black would have to be the side job occupying what little free time remained.
Antigravity Guy would have to go to the bottom of the list. So long as he was protected by the Eternal he was too well-defended, and there were marks every bit as important. She’d be more effective getting the easy challenges out of the way, than wasting too much time trying to get around the Eternal. She could apply time saved later to him, cash in the equity then.
FIFTY-FOUR
Cristo scrutinized the determined men holding spears along both sides of the narrow channel of water that flowed through the ice. It could have been a snapshot from their prehistoric past, from as early as 10,000 B.C., only these hunters wore parkas, not rawhides. The colors of their jackets, ranging from bright reds and blues and yellows through the bands of secondary and tertiary colors, gave them the ironic appearance of a flock of birds of every variety gathered to peck the meat out of the barnacles lining the whales swimming by just beyond the points of their spears.
The ones wielding the swords of justice had to move quickly.
Cristo gave the signal—a twist of the throttle.
And with that mechanical, throat-clearing sound, the snowmobiles lurched out from beneath their camouflage. The soft igloos of snow, covering them and their bikes, had been allowed to form around them unprovoked, courtesy of the windswept plains of the Arctic Circle bringing snow from as far away as Siberia.
The pair of automatic rifles mounted to the left and right of each snow mobile projected forward like headlamps throwing long shadows instead of light. The snow mobiles had been strategically spaced far enough apart to ensure the widest possible spread of bullets.
And so the hunters fell as they stood, as if they had never truly been alive, as if having frozen in place from another era, if not 10,000 BC, then from the 1970s or so. And with the breeze of bullets, they burst into clouds of red dust because the dried out, hollowed out forms could no longer stand on their own.
Archer, ironically, gave the signal to stop firing.
Somewhere along the line, Cristo and Archer had reversed roles. Cristo had become the visionary, driven by passion, purpose, and pernicious visions. And Archer had become the sober, detached soldier, emotionally numb to the realities of war, content to surrender leadership to Cristo now that they were headed into netherworlds he seemed ill-equipped to navigate.
Cristo didn’t even know what the rare species of whales they had just saved were called. They came equipped with built-in spears of their own. Long shafts of bone extended several feet in front of their bodies and came to a needle point. He couldn’t even tell you what the spears did, if they were vestigial, or very much a part of the animal’s defense and mating rituals. He could almost imagine them sword fighting one another with the long shafts during the breeding season.
One thing for sure, Cristo felt very good about himself right now, his only thought to brush the blood spewed by the gut-shot men off the precious whales for fear of irritating their hides. But their dunking themselves in the water, in between breathing through their blow holes, pretty much took care of that.
The giant Balansaur snapped pictures with his tiny Olympus camera, when a Hasselblad would have fit his hands better. He wanted them for the National Geographic write up that Capuera was putting together, infusing tales of their military strategies, which made Archer out as this generation’s Alexander. Capuera possessed the scientific acumen necessary to describe their use of ballistics, the one-of-a-kind scientific inventions suited to their man-of-war activities, and of course, the scientific rationalization for what they were doing. Capuera was convinced he could put it all together in a way that would win people over to their side. And the rest of them were certain they could not; they spent most of their waking hours justifying their crazed measures to themselves.
“Put the bodies on the whales’ snouts, like shish kebab,” Cristo shouted coldly over the howling wind. “Get some pictures of that. Tell them, this is the fate of men who would be heartless and soulless. To be desecrated like the sea creatures they were meant to protect.”
The order rippled through the ranks, relayed by Maelstrom. His hand-signaling system could cut across fields of ice better than global warming. He used his rifle to finish off the few whalers who were still twitching before Cristo put his hand over his rifle, forced him to lower it. “Put the live ones on the whales’ snouts first.” Maelstrom nodded, and communicated Cristo’s intent with the latest volley of hand gestures.
Cristo heard snickers as the wounded men were fitted shish kebab-like to the whale’s bony protrusions. Balansaur snapped pictures over the howling winds, the sound of the shutter like the door to hell opening and slamming closed to let through the gusts of bone chilling air.
The wounded men choked and gasped after being dunked in the water every time the whales dipped their snouts as part of their natural undulating movements. To say nothing of what those snouts run through their midsections must have felt like. Cristo thought, Maybe they won’t let themselves die because they finally feel some remorse for what they did in their roles as whale-killers.
“Have the men race ahead of the whales to strip the bodies off, once they’re no longer able to learn any karmic lessons from the experience,” Cristo said callously.
Maelstrom gave the signal, and the rest of the team, save Archer, jumped on their snow mobiles and headed for the front of the line of whales sporting human bodies like flotation devices.
“You know, I count on you to have the levelest head of the lot of us,” Archer said. He seemed no less mesmerized by the whales than Cristo, and continued to talk with his eyes affixed to their passage.
“My head is clear,” Cristo advised, “and my heart free of its strait-jacket for the first time to pump blood straight to my brain, sharpening my focus and intent still further. This is no more than nature finding a balance. So long as there are those who refuse to bend from their position as world-killers, we will not bend. And when their kind is gone from this Earth, so then shall we fade into oblivion to become the stuff of legend, like the boogie men of children’s tales told around a campfire.”
Archer harrumphed. “Sounds sage enough for me.” He waited for another whale to pass, to make it from one end of the creature to another, like a small schooner drifting by from this close, before adding any second thoughts. “Of course, I’m no philosopher.”
FIFTY-FIVE
Fabio idled the engines on his time machine. He listened to the servo motors winding down inside their magnetic fields, changing the properties of those fields as they did so, and dropping him out of hyperspace into conventional spacetime.
Which spacetime exactly, he couldn’t say.
He had yet to perfect the controls to such a degree. There was no way to take things further without seeing how the machine interacted with alternate timelines and the multiverse in its current state. There was no avoiding the trial and error stage, short of simply not surviving it. A very real possibility, he reminded himself, as he looked around for clues as to where he was.
He did not greatly miss those he left behind. Thoughts of the old man, Milton, who had become his surrogate father, sent discernible twinges through his body and made his heart skip a beat. As to Gretchen, Santini, Mort, and the rest of the gang, he felt mildly remorseful he didn’t feel more of a sense of loss after all they had done for him. But the bubble of excitement over his work and sense of adventure pertaining to it he kept around him didn’t allow anyone in by definition. It was an energy shield nearly as impenetrable as the one around his time machine when all its engines were properly synced and firing at full capacity.
Fabio stepped away from the time machine to stretch his legs. Wasting no time, he took the remote out of his pocket and pressed the button, folded space around the apparatus, made it thus invisible to the naked eye. In a very real way, wrapped in a transdimensional field, the time machine was more than invisible, it technically wasn’t there, and so fully protected should anyone or anything else try to occupy the same space. Just one of the motors idling was enough to achieve this effect.
He could expand the bubble around the time machine enough, in fact, to give him a workspace in which to carry out repairs without fear of encroachment from the outside.
His mind returned to the question of where the hell he was.
One thing for certain—this city was ultra-sleek and cosmopolitan. Tokyo of the future, maybe?
He allowed the direction of the street to inform his trajectory.
The concourse led him to the water’s edge. There he stopped, looked over the lip of the wharf, and gasped.
That was no water.
That was raw atmosphere.
This was a floating city!
Holy shit! He strained to see anything through the smoky orange atmosphere.
This couldn’t be Earth. Not even a very polluted future-Earth, whose potential smogginess, certainly, would surprise no one. The horizon lines were all wrong.
He grabbed the arm of the first passerby. “Where the hell am I?”
“We’re on the gas giant, Saturn. Wait a few hours, and you can confirm for yourself, as the sun sets, and the rings soar overhead.”
“But how can this be?” Fabio asked. “My body could never withstand the crushing pressures of Saturn.”
“Quiet the sense of alarm, young man. You talk as if you don’t have a body backup somewhere.”
Fabio gulped. “Body backup?”
“Surely you purchased one before downloading yourself to Sarnia? Most of us keep three or four around. More, if our pockets are deep enough. You can never have enough redundancy. Besides, you can send the extra copies of yourself on safari throughout the heavens. May as well make the most of life post-Singularity, eh?” He chuckled.
He looked like how people might evolve under several Earth-gravities. His short stature and lack of facial hair, including his lack of distinct eyelashes, looked eminently practical for Saturn. Just how vertical could one expect one’s body to be pushing against those kinds of gravitational forces? His bald head likewise seemed reasonable. What hair follicles would want to push through multiple Earth gravities just to look limp and be squeezed into buckyball strands under pressures more crushing than could be found at the bottom of Earth’s deepest oceans?
“I have just two backups myself,” Fabio said, lying. He didn’t know if he could trust this guy, nor did he want to invite the sport of hunting the fool with no backups to extinction. “I like your idea of using extra backups to explore the cosmos, though. Tell me, how much would one of those cost on Saturn?”
The man sighed. “A small fortune. Still, you hear stories once in a while of the scientifically inclined pulling patented designs out of their asses. They can then offer them up to the money changers and find themselves suddenly wealthy and able to buy three or more backup copies all at once.”
“Is that so?” he said, thinking of the diagrams for his time machine he had on a USB drive in his pocket. He wondered if it could still be read by modern technology, and even so, what use would these people have of a time machine when they could zip across time and space just as efficiently by downloading themselves.
Fabio wondered how the downloading technology worked. Perhaps Singularity pulses that traveled faster than the speed of light; they alone could violate Einstein’s constant. Any suitably futuristic intergalactic communication system would surely rely on them almost exclusively to bridge the otherwise unbridgeable distances. And, were it possible to digitize oneself, it would be just as easy to send oneself to the far corners of the universe as to send a message. Ray Kurzweil had predicted the scanning technology necessary to create a digital copy of oneself would be available as early as 2040. That reminded him, “What year is this?”
“Twenty-one fifty.”
“But that can’t be. Surely not enough time has passed to erect all this. Far less throw up an intergalactic civilization.”
“You sound as if you have no concept of Singularity science, man. The learning curve is post-exponential from within Singularity, compressing hundreds of years of scientific discovery into decades, then into years, then into months, then into the blinking of an eye.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Easy to forget about that,” Fabio said, prevaricating. He was ashamed he hadn’t given Singularity science much thought. “Back to the mystery of how I can be standing under Saturn’s immense gravitational pressures.”
“The city’s artificial magnetic fields keep us nicely at eighty-five percent Earth gravity, adding a little bounce to your step, and during moments of euphoria, making you feel positively superhuman.”
Magnetic fields, Fabio thought. Massaged and manipulated in such a way as to procure an anti-gravity effect. That might explain how the time machine had glommed on to this destination. He must remember to recalibrate the machine so it wouldn’t be attracted to magnetic field disturbances like the ones which it used to warp spacetime to Fabio’s benefit.
It was then he remembered that Saturn itself had a huge magnetic field at its poles, so powerful that its north pole formed a visible square the diameter of Earth, visible even from his home planet through the Hubble telescope. For all he knew, it was Saturn’s magnetic field that had drawn him here, and not the artificial magnetic fields around Sarnia. Without better calibration, his time machine would likely drop him off at Neptune next, whose magnetic fields were even stronger.
“You’ve been very patien
t with me,” Fabio said, eager to be rid of this guy so he could explore this world on his own, without any more cheats. Suddenly it felt more like a video game best explored by falling on his face, metaphorically speaking, while learning the rules of play. Providing of course he could get his hands on some body backups. “Might I ask where I can purchase a couple more body doubles? The nearest bank?”
Baldy pointed to an establishment which didn’t look all that far off. The more things change, the more they stay the same, he thought. In 2150, as in his day, there was likely a bank on every corner looking to make it all too easy to overreach yourself financially.
“Do you get my kind through here much?” Fabio asked. “Newbies, if you will?”
“Yes, of course. Most first-generation planet-hoppers stop off at Saturn before undertaking more daring jaunts across the galaxy—or even further into the unknown.”
“Surely, these worlds can be previewed before jumping to them, eliminating such a stepwise procedure.”
Baldy shook his head vehemently. “Not recommended. The VR is too vivid. Most go mad before they can even pull the plug on themselves. Best you get used to this world before tackling any, stranger. But I’m a pragmatist, and you’re clearly an idealist to have come here with so little preparation. Suit yourself.” He threw his hands in the air and walked on, suddenly keener to be rid of Fabio than Fabio was to be rid of him. He apparently didn’t favor the flakier of his kind. Now that “newbie” had been replaced in his mind with “fool.”
“Hey!” Fabio shouted. “Can I get your name?”
“This avatar is known as Zhang Wei,” he shouted back impatiently. “But my real name is Robin Wakefield.”
The Robin Wakefield? From early twenty-first century Earth? Surely it was just one fantastical coincidence. It was a common enough name.
Still, the Asian gentleman had appeared from out of nowhere, as if by magic.
Fabio chased after him, grabbed his arm. “If you had to tell me the most important thing about the nature of reality, what would it be?”
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 167