Before he could find the page where he’d left off, he mumbled, “Don’t know why people have to throw their limbs into a fight or sling bullets, when you can kill far more effectively without even being in the same room. Some might call that passive aggressiveness, I call it efficiency.” He glanced back at the two Ubuku Natives, pounding at the glass, choking, their faces peeling off them, coughing up a color of blood he’d never seen before mixed with clotting agents responding to the gases. “Okay, maybe it’s a little passive aggressive. But it’s not like they didn’t have it coming. They took me away from my favorite comic book.”
“Hey! You’re supposed to be clearing the cockpit to make this one ready for self-piloting mode,” another ALPHA UNIT member said, rushing by to fulfill his identical assignment on another fallen Goliath-Bot.
“What do you think I’m doing?”
“You’re reading a comic!”
“You haven’t heard of multitasking?”
“Oh wait, is that OMEGA FORCE? That’s like my favorite comic.”
“You didn’t seem so keen on watching them during Patent’s review meeting last night.”
“Yeah, well, I find the artistic renditions of those grisly scenes a lot easier to stomach.”
“You aren’t the only one,” Comic Book Reader mumbled.
“The dialogue any better?”
“Nope. They seem to speak in ways that fit into the little thought balloons just fine. I don’t think we’re missing a word.”
“So, if we can parrot back their entire conversations they’ll think we watched the actual documentary tapes so much we’ve memorized the footage and are actually even more eager students than we actually are.”
“You’re catching on.”
“How do they get the video capture anyway? They’re not wearing helmet cams. Hell, I don’t remember them wearing helmets.”
“Porous translucent skullcaps, your hair can grow through, if you have hair,” his friend said absently, continuing to have this entire conversation as he was reading and flipping the virtual pages of the comic with a swipe of his finger across the PDA screen. Multitasking was a bit of a forte. He checked back on the natives; they were coming along nicely. If he left them in the chemical oven too much longer, they might well make a mess of the cabin, but time enough for another chapter of his comic.
“Say what?”
“Yeah, the caps read their thoughts, capturing even the inner monologue, and the ‘camera’ is just what they see from their eyes that’s also captured by the skull cap. Each cap acts as a repeater for the other one so the unit’s combined broadcast capacity is enough to reach us back at ALPHA UNIT base camp while these guys summit in Crazy Land. Everything is quantum encoded. Without the key, God couldn’t open the Pandora’s Boxes of their minds. Which, if you ask me, should stay closed, but hey, in comic land this stuff is pretty ripe, let me tell you.”
“Hey! Stop lollygagging!”
Lollygagger looked up at the fallen Goliath-Bot up a ways, gestured he was coming. “Hey,” he said to Comic Book Reader, “You want to play together? We can write ourselves into the scenes, right? Change the storyline?”
“I think it’s what passes for growing a spine around here. The whole idea is to encourage us to enter their world by VR so someday…”
“Shit, you mean they’re just playing us?”
“No shit, Sherlock. It’s kind of working, though. Yeah, we can pretend to be our own version of the triple threat, you know? Just find a third guy.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Lollygagger said to Comic Book Reader as he rushed to catch up with his partner.
Once on site where the other Goliath-Bot had fallen, Lollygagger said, “How are we dealing with the natives inside the cockpit?” One look at them, and it was clear those coiled positions they were in was to allow them to spring out of the cabin at them like jumping spiders before they had a chance to react.
“I thought we could try the Ju-Jitsu Patent thought us. Maybe you could go with the Tae Kwon Do. We can see which one is more effective against the Ubuku?”
“Have you seen how these guys fight? You’re out of your mind.”
“Yeah, relax buddy, just yanking your chain.”
Chain Yanker used the diamond bit on his drill to bore a hole into the cabin and attach the tube. “Hate to break it to you,” Lollygagger said, “but this gag’s been tried already. We’re supposed to be testing out the prototypes, not getting attached to any one.”
“What do you think I’m doing?” Chain Yanker released the gas on his tank. The Ubuku natives inside flash froze, and then crumbled into ice cubes.
“Oh wow! If I was a cannibal, those would be some sweet popsicles.”
“Oh, I definitely plan on sucking on them.”
“Oooh. Gross.”
“Their bodies have got to be infused with so many mind-altering, body-strength-boosting drugs, so many ways of warding off insects, scent marking to intimidate even larger predators… Pass up a cocktail like that?”
They got the cockpit door open. Chain Yanker was already using the shovel to get some of the contraband into his large ice chest. “Hey, keep an eye out, will ya? Don’t want anyone catching on to what we’re doing. These people tend to gossip and blow things out of all proportion.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” he said picking up one of the ice cubes and sniffing it. Then he tried licking it. He nodded. “Definitely better than hashish brownies. I think you’re on to something.”
“What, you too? Shit, we’re gonna need a bigger ice box.”
“I’m on it.” Lollygagger said, running off.
Natty, walking up the line in search of Goliath-Bots ready for conversion to self-piloting mode, had witnessed the ALPHA UNIT in action, and how they dealt with war-time stress on the fly. At the time he felt nothing but condescension towards them, but now, now he wasn’t so sure.
***
Natty was working in his makeshift lab in the jungle, trying to get his mind around the nanotech alterations to the prisoners Leon’s men had brought back for him to study. When he looked up to see the detached head crawling his way towards him, using its ridiculously long tongue. No doubt intent on strangling Natty with the rope of a tongue or biting down on his jugular.
Ajax, less dazed by what he was seeing, drove a nail through the tongue with a nail gun he was using earlier for shelter fortifications. When the head didn’t seem the least deterred, Ajax grimaced and sunk a hatchet in its head. When that didn’t slow the head down, he put some fishing hooks he’d been using to keep the camp supplied in piranha soup into the meaty part of the head’s scalp and secured the lines to the table, again with the help of the nail gun. With the head unable to move from the spot, it tortured its facial muscles in an effort to get itself free.
Natty, staring mesmerized at the severed head the entire time, couldn’t get over how alive the eyes looked. Here was someone he’d only had time to think of as the enemy earlier, but now, he seemed as much a victim of current events as the rest of them. That his soul could find no rest in death petrified Natty at the time. It spooked him now that he had even more time to consider the Ubuku’s own humanity. They were little more than voodoo dolls in the hands of Jacko, whose drugs and hypnosis and ceremonies kept them enslaved to him.
Natty turned his eyes away from the detached head on the table at the time to take in the rest of the rogue’s gallery. The flaming man that Cronos had brought back from the jungle continued to hang upside down from a tree by his unburnable rope that also kept him bound as if in a net tightly stretched over him. He reminded Natty of “the fool” tarot card, which also depicted a man hanging upside down. But as with the severed head, it was the burning man’s eyes, not his inverted position that transfixed Natty. They shone too brightly for a man possessed, for a man in some voodoo trance. As if his altered state of consciousness made him curiously more alive than the rest of them. And so perhaps better able to appreciate the fact that he was both imprisoned
and burning alive.
***
Natty remembered being unnerved at the time by the image of the burning man hanging upside down, but muzzled the feeling. That suppressed feeling came to the surface now as he lay with his back to the tree like a breeching whale, taking huge gasps of air. The rain pelting him like so many bullets that had no trouble finding their mark but that just refused to kill. Preferring instead to chip away at him. The scared-stiff feeling beholding the burning man blossomed like a rose, each petal some other pent up emotion he scarcely had time to process at the time. Fear. Dread. Pity. Remorse. A desire to destroy, to completely annihilate the burning man so he could erase him from memory, eliminate any proof of his ever existing on the earth. And behind that feeling, guilt. And more guilt.
By the time he was through processing the deluge of feelings, Natty was scratching at his forearm, making himself bleed. As if the only way to ameliorate the emotional pain was to cause himself physical pain.
But the rolodex of images from his recent past kept flipping over in his mind.
Next up was Mr. Freeze. Yet another Ubuku native jacked up on nano at the time that Leon had seduced into a vat of liquid nitrogen.
The sight of whom could stop a charging rhino.
Instead it gutted Natty emotionally as if it were the horn of the charging rhino that was tearing him apart. As he lost his footing, Natty fell into the abyss of the memory well. Seeing himself drawing the biopsy needle out of Mr. Freeze, only, this time, unspooling all the emotions that had accompanied the act that at the time he’d ignored by simply changing the radio dial in his head.
He knew even before he’d reached the bottom of the well, he wouldn’t be crawling out again.
***
Someone was shaking him. Hard enough to make his head hurt. Hard enough to make him forget about the pain in his butt from sitting near comatose for so long. When he opened his eyes, Natty saw it was Leon.
“We need to get moving,” Leon said. “I don’t know how we managed to stay hidden this long. But the sentient serpents have picked up our trail judging by the shifting sounds in the forest.”
“What are you talking about?” Natty said, only half conscious. “It’s deathly quiet.” The rain had stopped. He was concerned that perhaps the reason it was so quiet was that the incessant rain had caused him to deaf.
“That’s what I mean.”
Natty took a look around, noticed everyone crawling out of the same safe-haven state of self-imposed catatonia he’d slipped into, or something close to it. They seemed as if they were shaking off the effect of some drug too. Leon, must have been the first to succumb and so the first to pull out of it and had no doubt awakened the others the same way he raised Natty from the dead. If the same thing that had happened to Natty had happened to them, then it was strange they’d all hit critical mass at the same time with what they could absorb emotionally from The War of Many Campaigns. A little too strange. But they’d all touched a sentient serpent by now, or at least breathed the same air that they breathed. Especially this close in to that last one, the one Truman and his people carted away.
It was just possible exposure to those things, even the smallest particle exhaled from their lungs, had a cathartic effect on humans. Putting people in touch with their most repressed emotions, the darkest demons, was also a way to disarm them. If they were too paralyzed dealing with their own emotional junk, then they were out of the fight. Was it simply a tactical ploy? Or was it something more?
Had Laney perhaps given the sentient serpents one more gift to impart to any who encountered them? A way perhaps to stop letting people, places, and things from their past control them like puppets. The way the sentient serpents were being controlled by the triple threat. Possibly Laney was not to blame. Perhaps the serpents were evolving their own countermeasures, cutting the threads that tied them to their puppet masters. And Natty and the rest of Leon’s entourage had just gotten a small taste of that.
Maybe the drug the Nomad Laney had tended was secreting wasn’t yet powerful enough to cut the ties on all those who were bound. Perhaps you had to have sufficient consciousness first. Explaining why Truman and his followers were immune. Maybe with successive generations of the secretion, even they could be freed from the hold their demons had on them. Is that why they took this particular juvenile Nomad? He was the first to hit upon this path of liberation? They wanted to keep him from spreading his genetic gift to the others? Or might he encapsulate still more genetic treasures of even greater interest to Truman?
If Natty was right about The Emotional Catharsis Secretion, the Nomad’s adaptation was a promising development. It could mean that one day soon the sentient serpents might not be able to be turned against their will to procuring any inhuman act in this world. More than he could say for himself. But likely that day would not come soon enough to rescue Leon and his people.
Leon gave him another shake to make sure he was back in the world of the living.
The latest stand in for the pulsating buzz of an alarm clock must have done the trick.
It dawned on Natty...
He retrieved the compass from his pocket, held it in front of Leon. “This was pointing to this hill earlier.”
Leon took the compass. Compared it to his own. “You’re right. It’s not showing magnetic north, pulled by a far stronger magnetic field, would be my guess. Good work, kid. You've shown us the way.”
Natty eyed Laney, “No, I think we can thank Laney for showing us the way.” He passed his thumb over the chip on her forehead, the one Laney had used to send her avatar to Natty with so many all-important messages. “Let's not take that out just yet,” he said.
Laney realized he was talking about the chip. “No, let's not.”
“Come on,” Leon said, “however far that compound is, we better get out of here. We’re still within the perimeter that the sentient serpents patrol. And my guess is Truman isn’t waiting for them to stumble on to us. He gave them our coordinates as soon as he had that creature out of here.”
FIFTY-FIVE
“What do we do with these specimens, sir? Now that you’ve switched focus to the sentient serpents?”
Truman looked past the techie in a white smock, one of several Asian scientists and engineers in his employ, many of whom were Chinese, but not all, scurrying about the FORESCO compound. The idea that all Asians were genius scientists was an ugly stereotype he was sorry to say he was perpetuating. And he shifted his eyes to the tanks, whose Plexiglas walls ran floor to ceiling. The naked Indian’s long hair floated about his face like a sea anemone seeking out food, sampling his face before moving on to test the debris floating in the water. His flipper-size feet would have humbled Olympic swimmers. So would have his gills, along either side of his neck. His skin seemed too fair for one of the locals, bleached perhaps by prolonged exposure to the fluorescent lighting, or perhaps by the ongoing chemical barrage he was subject to inside the tank. He paddled his feet gently, just enough to resist sinking to the bottom.
“I don’t know that they’re of much use anymore, An.” He reminded himself that “An” meant “tranquil.” The scientist did have a serene way about him that he appeared able to impart to his test subjects. The one in the tank looking him square in the eyes now showed no fear, showed no expression at all, like a good poker player. But Truman could sense his simmering intensity in the smoldering of his eyes. “Do with them what you will.”
“Perhaps they could be of use as early warning systems. If the sentient serpents can suffer most any environmental holocaust without blinking, we’ll need some way of detecting when things are getting too bad for humans. When perhaps some form of transhuman is required to survive the compromised ecosphere. And, as with these test subjects, when even they need upgrading further.”
Truman nodded as he walked the aisle of tanks. In the next one was a beluga whale man. Big head, with no neck, fused to a spine that he whipped from head to toe to propel himself about. His legs fused tog
ether, his conjoined feet a form of flipper. What arms remained were strictly vestigial. This one too regarded him with interest, but didn’t reveal much about his underlying emotions. Were they resigned to their fate? Eager to embrace it? What kinds of thoughts did fish people think exactly?
The Octopus Man was Truman’s favorite. Hard to tell which limbs were arms and which were legs on him. But he had many of each in any case, and they were absent any bones. Only flexible cartilage to accommodate the longer, whip-like extensions. His big head looked like it could fit a brain the size of a V-8 engine. But what might he use it for? No doubt An had some answers for him. If only he cared. No, for his purposes, this line of research was a dead end. But so long as funds weren’t tight, he was content to let An keep his pets. He was strange for someone from China. Those people treated pets as things to eat. Their zoos were a disgrace. Animal rights hadn’t yet entered their consciousness. No surprise, since human rights weren’t terribly high on their agenda either.
“Your rationale for keeping them alive seems valid, An. They’re at your mercy from here on out. God knows I don’t have any use for them.” Truman shoved his hands in his trench coat and departed the room without looking back.
FIFTY-SIX
Leon and Natty scoped the mountain before them, looking up towards its summit. “So far, nothing like the bald patch or change in terrain we’re looking for,” Leon said.
Natty sighed. “Let’s hope the damn compass isn’t simply pointing us to a huge iron ore deposit.”
“Anything else that can throw it off?”
“Large magnetite or lodestone deposits, they’re even more likely. Solar storm impacting this area, local fluctuation in the Earth’s magnetic field, and oh yeah, the mountain itself.”
“Nah, had Satellite rule that stuff out already.” Leon relaxed his gaze and just let the area seep into him. “My bet’s on that compound.”
Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1) Page 47