“Truman.”
Curly Hair tilted back in his chair and pivoted towards his partner, twirling his pen between his fingers. “That was easier than we thought it would be.”
“You know why, don’t you? He doesn’t give a shit about hallucinations. We got plenty of drugs that trigger far better ones. He gives a shit about alternate dimensions. Because if we can see into them, that means they can see into ours. It’s another line of attack we have to defend against.”
“You and your military applications.” He let the tension spring under the seat force him to sit up straight in a snapping motion by easing up on his legs, and pivoted away. “Not all funding is from the military.”
Long Hair looked at him with a smug smile. “Dude, the tie clip holding back my hair is DARPA funded. So are the condoms I used last night.”
Curly Hair ignored him, studying the photo of the shaman in the folder. Chewing his lower lip. “I wonder why he volunteered for the experiment.”
“Probably just looking to take his game up a level.”
***
“Professor, you better get in here,” Long Hair’s voice crackled over the microphone.
The scientist in charge of their project stepped into the vault of an observation room. The time it took him to get there was just more time for everyone to grow anxious in. Truman looked like he might have aged a decade just in the last few days, pushing him from his mid-fifties to his mid-sixties. Whatever he was dealing with, it was impacting what was going on in this chamber. Ironically, they’d yet to fill him in on the latest developments. “What’s all the hubbub about?” he said.
Long Hair pointed at the examination room on the other side of the glass. The old man, who went by the name of Jacko, a member of the Ubuku tribe of Amazonia in Brazil, located somewhere deep in the jungle, sat in the chair. About him, ghostly apparitions went about their business as if he didn’t exist. And he was haunting their world. He smiled placidly at them.
“Well, he’s taking things a good deal more calmly than his predecessors,” Truman said, his arms folded, swaying back and forth on his feet in another self-calming gesture Long Hair could only presume helped him think. He might just have been using his calf muscles as a subsidiary heart pump to get blood to his brain faster.
“You don’t get it,” Long Hair said. “The apparatus’s output lines are turned off. After just a few days with the machine, he’s learned to generate these brainwave patterns on his own.”
A pregnant pause. And a silence so vast, and yet so unable to swallow up the tension in the room.
“And that’s not all,” Curly Hair said finally, all too tentatively. He was chewing his fingernails and spitting the flecks like shrapnel. He pressed the button on the P.A. system. “Show him,” he said to Jacko. He turned to Truman and explained, “He doesn’t speak much English. But for what we need him to do, a trained monkey could pick up the vocabulary.” All eyes returned to the one-way mirror.
A fire demon materialized in the same room as Jacko.
Long Hair pointed at one of his monitors. “This is a brainwave pattern we haven’t seen before. He generated it himself. It’s not like he learned it from the machine. He’s trying to teach it to the machine. Only the machine can’t quite read his mind well enough to replicate it.”
“Send nurse Ratchet in there,” the professor said, his voice balanced precariously between keen interest and forced calm.
“You’re kidding, right?” Curly Hair said. “I definitely do not recommend that.” He squeezed so hard he broke the pen in his hand.
“She’s more disposable than chewing gum. Now send her in, or I swear to God I’ll throw you through the glass.”
“Yes, sir,” Curly Hair coughed out. “Nurse Dimely? If you could please check on our patient?” he said over the P.A.
Giving Curly Hair enough time to chew off a couple more fingernails first, Nurse Dimely finally stepped into the adjoining room. She had been the one standing in the chamber earlier when the last patient was freaking out, entirely unfazed. A trim woman with not an ounce of body fat despite being in her fifties. The face wrinkled from smoking more than from the sun. Her movements every bit as economical as her diet, she exuded self-discipline better than a military sergeant in uniform. Probably why Truman referred to her as Nurse Ratchet. The door locked behind her, courtesy of a button that the professor pushed on the panel before him in the observation room.
Jacko sent the fire demon after her. The creature, standing about seven foot tall, looking like he might have inspired an Egyptian statue or two in his day. The horse head on top of the warrior’s physique so clearly etched despite the fact that his entire tangible form was cut of flickering flames.
He grabbed the nurse by the neck and dangled her off the ground. Standing this close to him, she caught fire. And burned alive, bellowing, writhing, kicking, fighting him, however impotently, the entire time. Her intermittent screams sounding vaguely like battle cries, like the sounds Serena Williams was so famous for making every time she served the tennis ball back in the day. Dimely was quite a fighter. Long Hair and Curly Hair wincing and making faces and looking away intermittently and squirming in their seats were taking her plight worse than she was.
“A genuine prodigy, finally,” their absentee professor said, referring to Jacko.
The fire demon dematerialized before Jacko had finished the job. The woman dropped from where she was being dangled more than two feet off the ground, still half-alive, still moaning and writhing.
“Jacko’s having trouble holding whatever he’s bringing through from whatever dimension to this world,” Long Hair explained. “But that creature lasted a good bit longer than the last one.”
“He gives himself his own homework without waiting for it to be assigned. God, I love this guy,” Truman said. “Give him whatever he wants, you hear me, give him a Lear jet if he asks for it.”
“I think approval of those kinds of things has to come from you, sir,” Curly Hair said in the same tentative tone that was his baseline.
“Then pass the paperwork along for me to sign.”
Curly Hair was a lot twitchier than his long hair sidekick, fingering his hair and twisting it like a hot iron as if he’d curled the hair himself just by all his fidgeting. “And what do we do about Nurse Dimely, sir, if she expires on us?” he asked in that tremulous voice of his. She’s got family, friends.”
“I’m sure we can dig a hole big enough for all of them.” The professor tried to exit the room but the door had locked on him. He heard it lock before he touched it. Saw the reason for it locking, a psychically depressed button on the console.
All heads turned to Jacko.
Next to him was an ice demon. Or maybe that was another fire demon burning so hot the flames were blue and only appeared to be cold. Though the “flames” weren’t flickering like with the last guy; they looked frozen in place.
The ice demon jumped through the glass feet first. Sliced and diced the mailroom guy popping his head in just then with the daily deliveries of pre-scanned mail. Using blades built into his body, or perhaps growing out of his body. Like an exoskeleton of bones sharpened for a warrior’s purpose and used protectively like a bumper grill on a car.
His rage not the least abated after the brutal attack, Ice Demon turned to Curly Hair and grabbed his face between his hands and pulled as he put his foot down on the graduate student’s waist. Pulled so hard he was soon holding just Curly Hair’s face attached to a spine. The spine twisting beneath the head like a snake, or a writhing worm preferring to be put back in the earth. Curly Hair’s expression suspended forever between awe and surprise.
Ice Demon dropped the head and focused on Long Hair, who had retreated on his chair on rollers back into a corner like a turtle pulling in its head. But the warrior from another world dematerialized before he could get any further.
“I get it, you’d like to go home now,” Long Hair said, slamming the red button on the console that
opened the door in the adjoining room.
Truman who had just stood stoically, nodding approval the whole time, arms crossed in front of him, shifted his attention to the one-way mirror.
Jacko peered down at the shackles which bound him. Then focused on the machine which controlled the shackles and telekinetically depressed whatever he needed to depress on it for the binds to pop open.
He walked out of the room, barefoot, in nothing but shorts and body tattoos.
Truman wasted no time exiting, either, from behind his side of the one-way mirror.
Long Hair watched Jacko calmly ambulate down the hall towards the exit. He jumped on his P.A. system. “Jacko’s leaving the building. Please let him. If he asks for anything, please give it to him.”
He shifted his attention back to the dead bodies all around him. Curly hair, his severed head just at his feet. The mail man’s body parts separated from one another like a bizarre toddler’s IQ test, to see if he could fit them back together. The since-expired Nurse Ratchet in the next room.
Long Hair pulled at his collar, the cheap tie suddenly feeling too tight against the wrinkly white also-thrift-store-bought shirt. He jumped on his cell phone. Hit “one” on the pre-dialed numbers. “Professor Waller? You still have that opening for a techie for your experimental study? Why the sudden change in attitude? I think we might have touched a nerve. They’re carting away the bodies now. No evidence of this project will exist come tomorrow. Yes, sir, I know how important it is to build on success. I like to think I can really pick the winners. You could use a bit of my Midas touch? That’s wonderful news, sir! I’ll be right over.”
Before he could close the cell phone, security was indeed coming into the room and bagging and dragging the bodies out. All the data drives were being yanked from the computers. One of the security guys said to him, “We don’t have to tell you none of this ever happened, right?”
“No, sir, you sure don’t. This isn’t my first rodeo, sir.”
“Very well, then.”
Long Hair hightailed it out of the room. Using his time in the hall to compose himself. Untying his hair, combing it back over his shoulder with his hands. “God, I love this building.”
An elderly couple stepped out of the elevator he was walking by, grabbed his arm. “Is this the Harvard Brain Studies Building?” the wife asked. The blond wig she was wearing wasn’t fooling anybody.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Where do we go?” the husband asked. Both of them looked to be in their late sixties, early seventies, or maybe that was what the eighties looked like. He wasn’t all that good at telling age. Anyone over forty looked like the walking dead to him. The heavily-wrinkled male could have passed for a recently resurrected mummy as far as he was concerned.
“Any room is fine. Just not those two,” he said pointing back the way he’d come. “Those adjoining rooms are temporarily out of commission.”
“God bless you, son,” the husband said. “God bless you,” the wife echoed.
“No, God bless you!” Long Hair continued down the hall.
The couple looked in the direction of the adjacent rooms they weren’t supposed to go in. The soldiers dressed in all black were dragging out large sealed bags, sliding them across the floor. “Look, sweetie,” the wife said. “Trash bags that don’t rip. We have to find out where they do their shopping.”
***
Truman met up with Jacko just outside the neuroscience building. “Tell me what you want. I think you’ll find I’m prepared to be quite generous.” He waited patiently while the device dangling from his neck translated for him from English into Ubuku. If anyone asked, this tech didn’t exist either. Another Natty toy, designed when he was three. Still generations ahead of what was currently on the market. It was currently scanning Jacko’s mind in order to replicate his language, to which it had previously never been exposed.
Jacko smiled upon hearing the translation. Held the device dangling from Truman’s neck, fascinated, before releasing it. If nothing else it had put ideas in his head. Truman hoped they might be good ideas—at least from his perspective.
“I want my two children to be educated at one of your best universities in science and technology. And I want to continue my work here over the same time period.”
Truman waited for the gibberish to be filtered through the translator. “Done,” he said.
The old man smiled and turned his back on him. Truman grabbed his arm. The old man gave him a look that prompted him to release the arm real fast. “I just have one condition of my own,” Truman said. Ever the CEO. He came prepared to bargain with the devil and win. “A small matter of allowing me to conduct my war games in the Amazon rainforest. Just how much territory do you control?”
The old man waited for the translation, looked up at the man towering over him, and smiled ominously. Truman’s hairs were standing at the back of his neck before Jacko even moved his lips. “All of it,” the old man said.
Truman gulped. “We won’t need all of it, but that will do nicely.”
SEVENTY-EIGHT
Rainbow Eyes turned away from the Umbrage feasting on Jacko to face Leon, who winced in pain. “You can stop flinching now,” Rainbow Eyes said. “The voodoo is over.”
Leon snorted, and groaned even harder. “No, I think these are real pains, not the phantom kind.” He looked up from the jabbing pain in his side. “You’re their leader?”
“For now.”
“And how long is that for?”
“Until Purple Eyes takes over for me to help with the protection of the Amazon rainforest. I’ll be coming with you Space Cowboys to the stars.”
“Space Cowboys? I like that. A bit premature. But I’m a big fan of positive thinking.”
Rainbow Eyes helped Leon toward the theater’s double doors. And out and down the corridor. “You sure you read Natty’s mind right?” Leon said. “I assume that’s what you did.”
“And yours. You’d guessed as much yourself.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t believe it until now. That’s some pretty crazy shit, right there.”
“I guess he figured he’d have to mentally prepare you for it. With the Amazon Trials. Small steps,” Rainbow Eyes said looking down at Leon’s feet. “Hey, I made a funny.”
Leon smiled, taking another shaky half step. “He figured, huh? I thought Truman was the one who planned this little outing for him.”
“Yeah, but he never told Truman what the toys were for. Nor why he was suddenly losing it and in such dire need of a vacation.”
“Dire need?” Leon eyed him suspiciously. “Something you’re not telling me?”
“Depends. Do you heal quickly? Because I hate to kick a man when he’s down.”
Leon stopped dead in his tracks, turned to face Rainbow Eyes. Suddenly he wasn’t wincing anymore. “Yes, I heal quickly. Now, stop going inside my head to steal my best lines and just tell me.”
“Earth has gotten on the radar of some pretty nasty characters. All of whom are coming for us.”
“You’re talking about different civilizations? On different worlds?”
Rainbow Eyes nodded.
“You can resume holding me up now,” Leon said, his knees buckling.
Rainbow Eyes rushed to prop him up, catching him by the underarm.
“I’m not even going to ask how he knows,” Leon said.
“One of his little toys convinced them that Earth had entered Singularity. A time of exponential change, driven by breaking technologies.”
“Yes, I know what Singularity refers to. So, what you’re saying is, now we’re a threat to them, whereas before we weren’t.”
“Like I said, nothing gets past you, except for me.” Rainbow Eyes cringed supporting Leon’s weight. “You’re unexpectedly heavy,” he said.
“I thought all you guys were like super strong.”
“Yes, but you’re denser than most.”
Leon smiled. “Ha-ha. I guess I walked into that one.”
***
The Umbrage crawling along the walls was ready to pounce on his Ubuku counterpart, also crawling along the walls. And also ready to pounce. The Umbrage understood how he could defy gravity. He was most curious to find out how the Ubuku could do it. But he never got his chance.
The Ubuku tribesman lost the fire in his eyes, snuffed out by some fresh breeze blowing over his soul. He shook his head as if to help the fresh blood pumping to his brain to get to where it was going. Suddenly he looked at the Umbrage, spooked, and scampered off the wall, down to the ground, and ran for the nearest exit.
***
THE INNER PERIMETER OUTSIDE THE FORESCO COMPOUND
The Ubuku tribesman spun his sling in a circular motion above his head, preparing to release his poison-dipped flattened triangular wedge of river rock. So long as it broke the skin of his enemy, his job would be done. The Umbrage facing him, no less adept with his identical weapon was preparing to return the favor. The only question was which one would be ready to release their payload first.
But then the native Ubuku lost his concentration, his sense of purpose. The anger inside him, focused to a pinpoint, was gone, as if the needle responsible for the pinpoint intensity of rage had been removed from the back of his head. The alienness of the Umbrage, which hadn’t bothered him before, suddenly did.
He wasn’t scared. He was ashamed. Here was a creature that looked too much like their gods to be anything but one of them returned to show the Ubuku the way. A way long since lost under the tutelage of Jacko. Back from the time when they worshipped the forest lizards, not the birds. But now Jacko was gone. The Ubuku tribesman could feel it.
He dropped his weapon. Then dropped to his knees. Bowed repeatedly to his god in forgiveness. Then slinked away into the forest when the Umbrage too lowered his weapon and merely eyed him curiously.
There was still a chance for the Ubuku to save face. To return with a suitable offering. Perhaps a sample of the drug that had been used on him. Perhaps the Umbrage could use it to their own ends.
Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1) Page 61