The only solace she could take in this dratted state of affairs was that this was just one timeline. In innumerably many more, the Saturnians lived on—and who knew?—to do just as she surmised, assist humanity in some unexpected way. Whether they proved an impetus to human evolution, or as Perdue and Fabio had speculated, an obstacle, could not be determined from her current vantage point.
She was paying an ever-steeper price for acting with decisiveness with incomplete information in a universe rife with uncertainty. Purnell’s point could not be dismissed… the road to hell was indeed paved with good intentions. Each time she impacted the heavens so forcibly, for good or ill, it sent shudders down her spine. Not knowing the sum total of her efforts just made the situation all the more maddening. How could she tally pluses and minuses to arrive at any sense of victory or defeat when she didn’t know in which column to stick the checkmarks?
Ardel materialized beside her. “You’re getting a taste of what it’s like to operate on a large canvas.”
She didn’t know who he was, just that he was connected to her in some way; she could feel it. Rather than ask a tiresome list of questions, which she was in no mood for, she tapped the obelisk. Using it to augment her abilities, she simply strip mined whatever she needed from his mind. She was surprised to find she had room in her head for the blow by blow on an eternal’s life. “You are me, or what I’m growing into.”
“On the day you no longer need the obelisk, you will be me, for all practical purposes.”
“You’ve kept a protective eye on me in hopes I will take up the gauntlet for you someday. It appears the eternal can no longer bear his burdens, and wishes only for death.” She returned her eyes to the dead Saturnians drifting overhead and, to her lament, as if paying her respects at a funeral. “I’m sorry to disappoint you. But I see more reasons to retreat into myself than to push on. I’m not ready for this. Not for any of it. Nursemaiding Earth through a twenty-first century Renaissance is project enough.”
“You can’t fight what you are.”
His aura of certainty and calm resolve, the fact she hadn’t shaken his confidence in her fate in the slightest with her pronouncement, unnerved her.
“I must continue to purify myself, and strip away all signs of ego inflation. Tear myself apart and rebuild. Examine each broken piece like a watch maker intent on making the wheels turn more efficiently.”
Ardel chuckled. “It is your way. To construct new filaments with which to emit more light.” He gestured at his head as if light were pouring out of it. “You are more a bulb maker than a watch-maker. But sooner or later the light spills out across all creation. You will come to protect it all as I have because that is what you are. Anything less is beneath you. Even your faux humility. Your crises of confidence just lends an intermittent quality to your guard duties, risks dangers that cannot be averted while you’re in that part of your cycle when your bulb has blinked out.”
“The divine ground is the ultimate reality check. It will find a way around my shortcomings, if that’s what they are. There are others I’m sure, even more capable of filling my shoes.”
Ardel laughed. “Yeah, you’re looking at him. You’ll find few can play at our level. At least, just yet. Maybe fast forward in time enough, and we gardeners tilling the soil of the multiverse will be the norm rather than the exception. But we’re not there, yet. If you’re determined to see your egalitarian nature amount to anything, you’ll do all you can to get us there.”
“Risking possibly slowing our progress in the process.”
Ardel shrugged. “I’ve seen no evidence that my not intervening would have helped things measurably, even with all my mistakes factored in. Intention is everything. And there’s the Godhead, as you say, who is happy to play you off the other instruments in the orchestra to masterful effects, however off cue you are as an instrumentalist.”
“Out of curiosity, how many possible replacements for yourself are you keeping an eye on?”
Ardel smiled wanly. He joined her vigil in taking in the dead Saturnians floating overhead. The smog this time of day, which the night stars or Saturn’s rings could not penetrate, aided in the Saturnians getting the reverence they deserved, as neither were present to pull focus.
“We’ll speak again, Robin Wakefield, when you’re less full of yourself.”
She smiled ruefully, watched him dematerialize in slow motion, like a cherished memory she couldn’t hold onto, anymore. Maybe that was his intent, or rather, part of his rhetoric.
She would forget him nonetheless when her expansive phase came to an end, and like the ocean responding to the Moon’s gravity, her low-tide consciousness replaced her high-tide consciousness, awaiting a time when she was strong enough again, confident enough, and sentient enough to paint on a larger canvas, to implicate herself across the entire cosmos.
Thank God her full-moon phase was coming to an end, measured by just how much her rising guilt was breaking the back of her sense of self-empowerment.
She dematerialized from Saturn, used the power of the obelisk to teleport her back to her bed—where this was all just a bad dream.
FIFTEEN
“Sir, it’s coming.”
“The shield’s up?”
“Yes, sir.” Addley fine-tuned his listening device to make sure he was hearing correctly. Never mind his eyes were relaying sufficient confirmation from the remaining scanners. “Sir, it’s not even slowing.”
Ordinarily, Mason would rebuke the scientist for conveying so much emotion in his voice, risking rattling the rest of the men. But these HAARP geeks weren’t exactly military trained, and he couldn’t exactly do without them. What’s more, truth be known, his nerves were a bit frayed, as well.
“Instructions, sir?” Addley said.
“Yeah,” General Mason replied. “Make out your will.”
***
Robin regarded the approaching spaceship. The one thing more fascinating than the fact she appeared immune to the subzero temperatures, and the brewing snowstorm at the Alaskan HAARP center, was the fact that a spaceship the size of a city was approaching. The force field this station existed to generate wasn’t doing its job. However advanced its technology; the spaceship’s technology was more advanced.
She grabbed hold of one of the towers and fed her energy into the grid. Nearly half a panel on the obelisk was lit up before the ship faltered. This was already more power than required to split the planet in two. But the obelisk was working. In the final analysis that was all that mattered.
The ship crashed less than a mile from where she was standing. Let’s hope the rest of their people get the message. She’d leave it up to Alexandra and her crew to peel away the spacecraft’s secrets.
Time for her well-earned vacation.
Time to forget.
SIXTEEN
“I need this thing light enough to carry,” Alexandra said, refusing to believe it had any such capability.
“Better than that,” Brandon said. “Here, A2, jump in.” He held out Alexandra’s backpack, an internal-frame light-weight job, more suitable to a day hike. A2—Alexandra’s robot equivalent—leaped off the ground, folded down to size and into position in midair before landing to fit inside the backpack.
Alexandra picked up the backpack and tried it on for size. “Christ, it’s light as a feather.”
“Well, you always were a bit of an intellectual lightweight,” Boyd chided. “We saved on all the brain matter.”
“We’re nearly in position,” Brandon said, after checking the terminals on the aircraft. The all-weather scanners could see their way through a nuclear blast. Alexandra could tell from the increased air turbulence, and the sounds outside, they were headed into bad weather, and, perhaps, closing in on an even worse idea.
Alexandra removed the backpack. “What else can it do?”
“Show her,” Boyd commanded A2.
A2 propelled herself out of the backpack with alarming speed to land on her feet ready
for action. She drove her right fist through the fuselage. The rest of them held on before the sucking force of the cabin attempting to repressurize.
As an encore, A2 ripped a seat off its housing, stripped the fabric off it—one hand motion per activity. Then she crumpled the metal skeleton of the seat to the size of her fist. That took all of three or four squeeze plays between both hands. She used the plug to fill the hole in the fuselage, lasered in the metal to the edges using beams emitted from her eyes.
Boyd clarified, “She can toss a Mack truck. She can leap tall buildings with a single bound. Well, two or three bounds, depending on the height of the building… You get the idea.”
“What about her mind-melding abilities?” Alexandra asked, realizing she sounded all business, robbing her sidekicks of much of their fun. This was playtime for the kids, but she was getting ready to jump out of the plane with this robot as her only backup.
“Exactly as requested,” Adrienne reassured her. “Question Brandon’s handiwork all you like, but you question mine, and, well, quite frankly, that’s like asking if God exists. Some things you take on faith.”
That comment elicited a half-hearted smile from Alexandra. “Fine,” she said. “I guess we’re a go, then.”
Adrienne drifted through the hollow fuselage of the C-130 in a get-up which didn’t leave anything to the imagination. Alexandra was horrified by how much weight she’d put on in such a short time. She had to be six hundred pounds, easily. The maglev outfit made fast work of the metal surfaces that lined the interior of the plane, and allowed her to drift almost identically as she would in deep space. Alexandra supposed that was the whole point of the suit.
Her feeder, Averly, was now forever at her side, forever ensuring the conveyor belt from her mouth to her stomach never ran entirely clear of product. That made, Averly, de facto, the latest member of their team, as he couldn’t exactly be excluded from their ex parte communications. Alexandra fumed quietly at the thought. But her people were too good and she depended on them far too much to deny them anything they wanted. Averly had undoubtedly been vetted by Adrienne far better than she ever could, what’s more. Adrienne was the cyberspace whiz who could track down everything on Averly he didn’t even know about himself, force facts and fictions about him running rampant on the Internet through her truth-saying algorithms, which were no doubt better than any truth serum Alexandra could inject him with prior to giving him the third degree. She let the subject of Averly’s unwanted presence go with mild annoyance.
“Time to bounce,” Alexandra said.
“What, you don’t want to unwrap my present?” Brandon sulked.
Alexandra sighed. “Let’s see it.” The fact she had to fight to keep her balance as the plane rode out the latest air pockets meant patience with Brandon was taking energy from her she just didn’t have. “Just so it isn’t some two-headed creature they mistake for one of the aliens.”
“It’s your other twin,” he said. He opened the lid on the trunk shaped suspiciously like a coffin. A3—the clone—sat up.
Alexandra shook her hand. “I understand you were just born to die.”
“That’s me.”
“What’s with the hyperbaric chamber?”
“Bit of an anti-aging freak,” A3 explained. “Must be a perverse reaction to my short life-expectancy.”
Alexandra laughed. “I gather power dreaming is part of the package.”
“Trained myself to live five lifetimes an hour.”
“Yeah, that’s probably how I’d play it.” Alexandra handed her a parachute. “With any luck there won’t be any radiation down there for you to contend with that I or the robot can’t handle, and you can get on with your power dreaming.”
“Don’t bother. Nice really doesn’t become us.” A3 fit the parachute to her shoulders.
“Yeah. Consumes precious resources like time and energy.” Alexandra tried to get the bitter taste out of her mouth. Clones could be hell on the self-image.
She signaled Boyd to open the back end of the plane.
As the gate slowly opened, over the sound or rising air turbulence, she shouted, “You sure this thing isn’t some artifact they dug up from over a hundred-thousand years ago?”
“You wish,” Boyd said. “That ship crash-landed yesterday.”
Adrienne chimed in, “From all the cloaked chatter running through security channels on the Internet, I’d say the intergalactic war to end all wars is on. All without the public knowing a damn thing. Figures.”
A2, already synced to Alexandra, didn’t wait for further instructions. She jumped in Alexandra’s backpack, responding to Alexandra’s thought impulses even more quickly than Alexandra could respond to them. They had full telepathic union courtesy of A2’s ability to scan the electromagnetic waves Alexandra’s brain produced when up close and translate them. From further away, she could receive radio transmissions from the nanobots infesting Alexandra’s brain. That was Boyd’s value-add. They hadn’t exactly had time to road test the hive mind infesting her to see if it needed de-bugging, if she could pardon the pun. Her entire brain felt as if it were infested by lice. She scratched her scalp, developing a nervous tic from what she suspected were psychosomatic symptoms.
A-3 jumped out of the plane ahead of her. Leave it to her replicas to be even more like her than the real thing.
“Don’t forget to write,” Brandon said, smart-assed, as Alexandra lurched into the wind.
She dropped out of sight thinking, When did he become comic relief? Maybe under pressure they were all becoming something they weren’t five minutes ago.
***
Falling below the clouds, Alexandra saw it, and gasped.
The spaceship was just circular enough to satisfy diehard sci-fi fans who weren’t about to accept anything else from intergalactic forces invading Earth if they expected to be taken seriously. The craft had to be at least a mile wide.
As she dropped in closer, losing altitude, she corrected her estimate. At least three miles wide, and counting…
She was close enough now to ground level to take in the elaborate efforts already underway to keep the alien ship off-grid, and defuse any radar installation chatter it had managed to trigger. There had to be the equivalent of three or more National Guard forces deployed on the ground to secure the perimeter. Already, dogs at the end of chains pulled at their human masters, and bomb squad robots roved surfaces, exploring nooks and crannies. There were also the miniature droids that went places no human could be talked into going.
She was getting to where she’d have to pull her parachute. Its camouflage gray, along with the rest of her outfit, blended seamlessly with the gray sky weather, keeping her presence incognito. For now. Helping in that regard was her size relative to the ship. She was near enough to evaluate the UFO more closely. They could string all the world’s aircraft carriers end to end and still only get about halfway across the thing.
God help them if this was just a scout ship.
SEVENTEEN
Aart lifted the tray with the champagne bottle, and brought it to Robin. Her eyes were glued to the big screen TV in one of the downstairs drawing rooms.
He stood just within her peripheral vision, something he was most adept at judging; in case she needed a repast, she would know he was there.
This was the first time she’d turned on the TV. Curious, he looked up and realized she was embroiled in a tennis game between Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. The monograms adorning the walls of the court alerted Aart this was the Monte Carlo Rolex Masters tournament.
The sportscasters had caught her attention even more than the match. He could tell by how she turned her ear to the nearest speaker every time they talked.
Male sportscaster: “You can see how Nadal has changed up his game to reverse his seven game losing streak to Djokovic. He typically serves his lefty-slice to the right hander’s backhand to start the point. But Djokovic has one of the best backhand returns in the history of the game.”
Female sportscaster: “You’d think he’d have woken up to the error in that approach a lot sooner.”
Male sportscaster: “The other thing we see him doing is he typically serves first down the T in the deuce court and out wide in the ad court. But he is completely staying away from his favorite spots in this match.”15
Female sportscaster: “There’s no question the new strategy is working.”
Seeing Robin grip the remote, Aart bent at the waist to put the tray more within reach, and cleared his throat to gain her attention.
“You seeing this?” Robin muted the volume. “The announcers add value by critiquing every dimension of the game. This is the beginning of the turnaround in the collapsed global economy.” She excitedly jumped off the couch to pace and give herself room to talk with her hands. “This emerging age of hyper-analytics.”
“Champagne, mam?”
Robin hadn’t heard. Too full of herself. “Soon, no part of our lives will escape this kind of value-added feedback from everyone around us.”
“My back, mam. Afraid it won’t last another minute.” His voice already quivered.
“It’ll be sewn into our cultures: at work, at home, at play.”
“If you could get your head out of your ass for just one second, mam. It might spare me a back brace.”
She pointed at the TV. “That ongoing feedback will accelerate the learning curve, help us all to reinvent ourselves.”
“No one can face reality like you, mam. Now if you can just notice I’m dying over here.”
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 188