Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1)

by Dean C. Moore

  Leon kept peeling leeches off with every confession, as if Ajax was earning the right to come clean. “My mother was dead and gone from the picture by that point. It was just me and him. One day I brought home someone I really cared about. When he started going to town on the Jewish princess jokes I beat him to a pulp. He slipped into a coma. Never recovered. Used to tell him the same stupid dirty jokes by his bedside just in hopes of getting him to wake up again, to revive laughing.

  “He was a white Anglo-Saxon man who never made much of himself despite having high hopes. He blamed it all on equal opportunity for women, for blacks, for Hispanics, all the minority groups able to work the job cheaper than him, put in longer hours, do more for less. The invasion of political correctness was good for the planet, not so good for us white guys.

  “He was right, of course. Jobs were getting harder to come by for anybody, with increased automation and robotics and self-help-IVRs. Software and intelligent machines could do what, hell, even most lawyers and doctors could do. And employers looking to cut costs where they had to hire humans at all wanted minorities because they worked cheaper, complained less, were more fearful of speaking up against any injustice for fear of losing their jobs, and best of all, many spoke two or more languages.

  “It was just the wrong era for him. Life was growing more complicated than he could handle. He had a mind for jokes though. He did that well. I should have been celebrating what he did well, sharing the one thing he took joy in.”

  Leon told him to stand so he could get the leeches on Ajax’s ass and the back of his legs. “So you tell the same despicable jokes now as your way of getting close to him? A chance to get inside his head?”

  “I guess. I should have had more empathy, more understanding.”

  “And when others beat you into the ground for that mouth you have on you, what’s that, penance?” Leon picked off another leach.

  Ajax snorted. “Maybe.”

  Leon had extracted the last of the leeches now, and it was his turn to sit on the log, and Ajax’s turn to take over with the leech removal. They communed in silence for the longest while as he reflected on Ajax’s words. “You never served any jail time?”

  “Nah. It was a small town. Everybody knew what he was like. They wondered how I’d stood it that long.” Ajax pulled off the latest leech, marveling at what looked to be a small snake writhing in his hands, the sheer size of it, before dropping it in the bucket.

  The silence engulfed them again. “We all do the best that we can do, Ajax. Remember that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “For what it’s worth, your dad’s awful jokes have probably saved a few of these guys from blowing off their own heads. I’m glad you could make him effectual in the world in a way that he could never be.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But one day, you’re going to have to let go of him to find out who it is you’re meant to be. Don’t be surprised if you turn out to be that social liberal you pretended to be for your father’s benefit.

  “Speaking of how technology is affecting us all, there’s a new Space Age underway. Imagine taking your rainbow coalition sympathizer sensibility out into the cosmos to embrace a diversity of cultures and civilizations that would blow most people’s minds. You might be an ambassador to the stars someday. All things grand come from humble beginnings.”

  “You really think things could move that fast? Maybe if I’m still alive hundreds of years from now.”

  “Don’t be surprised to find the future sneaking up on you. Things that seem hundreds of years away might just be decades away if this futurist Ray Kurzweil is right.”

  Ajax snorted. “I’ll have to pick up one of his books. Okay,” he said stepping back to admire his handiwork, “what does it taste like when you go down on an old lady?” He slipped the credit-card-like strip of plastic back in his pocket. “Depends.”

  Leon chuckled silently. “Please tell me that’s the last of the leeches.”

  “Yep, all done. Can’t believe you made me waste a captive audience like this on all this heart-to-heart drivel.”

  “And there go up the defenses again. It’s like one of those Star Trek episodes. ‘Shields up, Scotty! Shields up!”

  Ajax chuckled. “I really have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  The memory faded and by then Leon was done for. He was sobbing unrestrainedly. Someone should have come over to slap him out of it already. He was giving away their position. Hug him, console him, something.

  It occurred to him finally that, per recent events, they might be enduring their own dark night of the soul. Drowning men didn’t make very good rescuers.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Cassandra couldn’t stop herself from shivering. It was at least eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit in the jungle, in the shade. She threw a couple more logs on the fire and crawled into the welcoming arms of the flames. Brought her knees up to her chest. Wrapped her arms around herself. And still the shivering wouldn’t stop. Did anyone try to pull her out of the fire? No. As far as she could tell, no one had even noticed. They must have been too caught up in their own personal hells. It had been one of those days. She wanted to believe it was just her nanites that were out of adjustment. But she knew that wasn’t the truth.

  Sociopathic mode always cost her dearly. In the moment it often made the difference between life and death. But then would come the aftermath. In the quiet nights that followed. The lizard men she’d taken out in such wholesale numbers haunted her. In blur mode, moving so fast, it was easy to lose sight of the trees for the forest. But when her mind slowed down, their faces always came into bold relief. The expressions on those faces telling her far more than she wanted to know. She had shared a psychic connection with the ones she’d killed thanks to her own interventions. So she knew their hopes and dreams that she’d shattered like glass.

  The blue-eyed one. He’d wanted to find a tribe in the amazon to protect. One that was being encroached upon by civilization. Forced out of their hunting grounds to make way for some cow farm and corporate sponsors more interested in supplying hamburgers for MacDonald’s and Burger King food chains across the globe. Or more concerned with strip mining the area for gold and other precious metals. He saw himself watching over the clansmen at night from the trees. Advancing against assassins the corporations would send when the natives didn’t get the message. Against loggers with their giant tree-cutting machines and engineers with their road-making vehicles, he’d descend at night to sabotage their equipment before they got too close to the tribe. Until they took the hint to blaze a trail some other direction.

  The ones that came with guns, Old Blue Eyes would eliminate one by one so the others couldn’t sleep for fear of when he was coming for the next one of them. Always they stood guard in their cabins, around the perimeter of their compounds. Always he made short work of their professional skills, dropping them as if they had been unarmed. None of them had ever gotten off a shot. He had rehearsed it all in his head ahead of time. Blue Eyes came out of the womb with an encyclopedic sense of the Amazon River region, knew every inch of it, every edible tree, shrub, insect and mammal. Every tribe, its customs, practices, lore, and language.

  Laney had somehow figured out how to turn Truman’s greatest weapon against him. Put it in the service of the greater good. The Nomads and the Umbrage both—their minds were filled with such images, such mandates, such a compelling sense of saving the ancient world from the modern world. She was never more proud of her sister than she was at that moment, seeing how in one act of subterfuge she had saved not just two new species the world had never seen before in the Umbrage and the Nomads, but very possibly countless others facing annihilation in the Amazon rainforest.

  Who could really stop the encroachment of civilization? It was an impossible task. And yet Cassandra had no doubt that Laney’s sentient serpents could. Whatever was thrown at them, whatever overwhelming tech and force, they would just adapt on the spot to neutralize it, and with
in a few more generations there would be nothing anyone could throw at them. The Amazon jungle would be theirs.

  Laney must have used the advanced imprinting abilities of the sentient serpents to download whatever encyclopedic knowledge was stored on that chip on her forehead, or perhaps by way of some quantum-encrypted link the chip had to the RevoCorp satellite network. If the Umbrage particularly could visualize so well what was going on inside their bodies at a cellular, even a molecular level in order to make genetic alterations on themselves, then she had turned that expanded memory space into something that would serve them on yet another level.

  And what had Cassandra done to her sister’s masterpiece? What but rip at the canvas upon which she’d painted her dreams like a mad jealous witch. Cassandra supposed she was jealous in that moment. All the people she’d killed in the name of the greater good had had zero impact on the world. The fact that the “greater good” was something corporations got to define these days was no small part of the reason. But even if she could eliminate genuine threats to humanity, the corporate leaders that employed her chief among them, the hydras would just grow more heads. No, to make the world a better place you had to be an unstoppable force of a different kind. The kind Cassandra would never be. But that Laney and Natty would be. Cassandra was ashamed at the sense of satisfaction that came of killing every Umbrage and Nomad she could get her hands on. Pray now that enough of them remained that the visions worthy of a saint would still get a chance to play out.

  Yellow Eyes—for all their identical body types and faces, no two had the same colored eyes—he had dreams of his own that dovetailed into those of his many siblings. When the nano-net tore through him, the last thing he saw in his head was the dream he’d been sent here to make real. He was to be a marine biologist. She saw him in her mind’s eye as he saw himself, working along the banks of the Amazon River. Receiving the “gifts” from the natives, mutated creatures in need of fixing. The river dolphin with an extra head sticking out of its side. The Siamese octopuses that needed to be separated to live a normal life. The piranha born with no teeth. The water snake with two heads at opposite ends. Each tortured animal they brought to him he operated on, fixed, and studied their physiology under the microscope. Until he could isolate the inoculant he needed to dump into the river to strengthen the animals’ immune and reproductive systems.

  With unwavering conviction, Yellow Eyes used his superior senses to track the sources of the pollution, the oil spills, the chemical spills. Back to their sources. And the human natives for whom he was a shaman of sorts would take it from there. They would wreak havoc with the businesses until they had no choice but to pull out.

  If Yellow Eyes was the Marine Biologist, then Orange Eyes was a doctor to the tribes’ people. His work wasn’t too different than Yellow Eyes. Only, he operated on mutated humans. The sixteen year old child with his twin brother hanging halfway out his belly, looking maybe just a few years old for his lack of proportional development. The serpent people had a way to heal even such deformities, a medicine that seemed to transcend anything in the West. But then again, they’d been born to a mother whose bioengineering expertise was second to none on the planet. Orange Eyes doctored Siamese twin girls joined at the heads, separating them. A man with no legs. Growing them back for him as if he were a salamander. Using its superior knowledge of reptilian physiology and how best to apply it to humans. Collectively the lizard men were the kind of alien invasion of Earth you could only pray for.

  Always the Umbrage did the heavy lifting with the sciences, the new order’s intellectual class. The Nomads handled the majority of the burden of incessant attacks from outsiders. Just one of them could dismantle the most fearsome of heavy duty forest killers, crushing underfoot logging machines, road making machines, mining machines, like a frustrated child bored with its LEGO blocks. Cassandra could read their far more primitive minds just as sharply as the Umbrage as they died at her hands.

  As much as they looked alike, no two Nomads and no two Umbrage were born the same. Each one with a unique mission that was a key puzzle piece to the picture of protecting the Amazon forest. And now, Cassandra had torn holes in that picture that might just make the whole thing go up in smoke even if she couldn’t, sitting inside the fire.

  Maybe that’s why Laney had made them psychically connected to one another. So they could sense when a comrade had fallen, just what missing piece had been removed from the picture puzzle. So they could morph themselves or their offspring accordingly. Maybe Laney had made them and their visions sabotage-proof.

  The thought warmed Cassandra. For the first time inside the fire her shivering was subsiding. But then she remembered the headgear the Umbrage and the Nomads were wearing. Their tormented struggles to be free of it. The pain and the anguish secreted by the triple threat descending on their minds and their visions of a better world like a grey fog, obscuring everything. Leaving only an ever expanding nothing of greyness. Like the void at the center of the beings of the master manipulators themselves.

  That was the role Cassandra was meant to play. Freeing the others the way she had freed the first one she’d befriended in the jungle. But she was too focused on putting the triple threat in their place, checking their move against her in the forest. She was keener on showing them that she could best each of their abilities in turn and that no wall they could erect between them and her was going to slow her down much. She’d made her point, but at what expense?

  The shivering that had started to subside, escalated again.

  And that brought her to Brown Eyes. Cassandra was getting the distinct expression that she would not be freed from her purgatory until she’d done each of them the honor they deserved by celebrating their lives and mourning their deaths as only she could. Ironically, she knew them better in the short time they lived than even their own kind knew them, better even than Laney. With any luck Cassandra’s heart would not run cold before she’d paid her penance. The way she felt right now, she wasn’t sure her nanites could protect her from her systems shutting down.

  FIFTY-TWO

  The images coming into Laney’s mind unbidden were hammering it to mush. They brought with them an increased blood pressure and pounding heartbeat that was forcing too much blood to her brain. The resulting migraine continued to grow like a mushroom cloud running from an atomic explosion. Just never powerful enough to climb over the pain of the memories themselves.

  When she was on the spaceship, she could feel each stabbing injury to that pitiful creature in the arena as one of Panno’s men wedged his blades between the Nomad’s scales. Pains it had endured that she had tuned out during the gladiatorial games so she could focus on particular regions of its brain. Encoding in the genes the capacity to retain memories, visions, dreams and drives that would never fade. Giving the sentient serpents, both the Nomads and the Umbrage, reason to live in those dreams and visions, a way to reform life in this part of the world, to reclaim the forest not only as their own but for all creatures.

  That wondrous mindchip Natty designed attached to her forehead allowed her to make genetic tweaks on the fly, compressing generations of experiments in the virtual world into seconds and minutes and hours that would have taken months and years in the real world. It allowed her to bolster the sentient serpents’ smarts and their genetic adaptability without nanites, without a lab full of CRISPR, CAGE and MAGE units, just by combining her psychic connection with the animals, which the chip also facilitated, and its supercomputing, timewarping abilities. But to do all that she had to ignore the pain the Nomads and the Umbrage were enduring to focus on her work. Just like they had to ignore the pain administered through the headgear by Panno, Mudra, and Jacko. Pain Laney allowed herself to feel now. Screaming into the night.

  Why didn’t someone come to throw a gag over her mouth? She would alert every predator, human and animal alike, for miles.

  As the second round of memories hit her, now the pain was mixed with guilt, guilt for not doin
g more for the Nomads and Umbrage in the arena during the gladiatorial games when she could. The best she could hope for now was that they might learn, as she did, to ignore the pain, to push past it to do the work of genetic adaptation that needed to be done to free themselves, even while attached to the headgear, even going against the demands of their oppressors. A thin hope at best, because she knew how much more exquisitely tuned the sentient serpents’ nervous systems were relative to her own. A point driven home now as the pain of the flames turned on The Petrified Dinosaur came into her body as it had before, only without the distraction of her furious mental activity to shield her from it. As the anguish of the exploding grenade in the gut of one of the Nomad’s tore it open. The explosion strong enough to bring it to death’s door, just not strong enough to fry its nervous system relaying the pain to its brain. That pain came into her now, as well.

  Laney instinctively held her tummy and rubbed it. To a human female the only thing that came close to this kind of pain was giving birth. And so some part of her couldn’t help stroking her belly as she cried out. She must have sounded to those vultures nearby as if she were giving birth.

  She didn’t know if she was strong enough to take in the pain of the Umbrage. The pain of the Nomads was bad enough. The higher sentience of the Umbrage would allow them to react in ways to the pain that the Nomads couldn’t dream of, with emotional cascades and mental flourishes that flowed like avalanches and pushed against the limits of each sense like rolling thunder.

  She had had no choice but to pack their minds with even more exalted visions of things to come for them. They would be the redeemers of this jungle world, its doctors, its bioengineers, its rapid-evolvers, inserting as much distributed intelligence into the ecosystems within the forest as needed, making the entire jungle sentient one day, if need be. All the intelligence in the world needed to resist any onslaught. That holy mission would allow the Umbrage to offer up their pain in gratitude to the god of self-transcendence that lived within them. To martyr themselves to its cause. It was madness, but it was a way to climb above the torture that would have crippled unupgraded minds and nervous systems. Like it was crippling her now to take in the latest wave of agony at what the Umbrage had endured from the moment they crawled out of the belly of the fallen Nomad.