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

by Dean C. Moore

  “Will you shut the hell up and help me unscrew the armrests on these chairs?” Dubois yelled. “So we have something to fight with.”

  “So we look like every other dildo in every other movie who thinks he can fight off a zombie massacre single-handed? Do I look like Milla Jovovich to you? I’d never pull off the knee-high boots.”

  The truth was, Stan could stand to lose a little weight, with or without zombie assistance. He was a good fifty pounds over any reasonable measure of “lean”, and pasty skinned. His computer-geek-chic missing since he’d pocketed his blue-lens glasses meant to reduce the glare of a computer screen. But if Dubois was being honest, he wasn’t sure his perpetual Indian-brown skin was all that brown anymore in the absence of a black light, which alone illuminated his FORESCO living chambers. He doubted he was the picture of health anymore himself.

  Dubois screamed as one of the zombies got ahold of him and bit into his neck. “No panicked-bitch screaming,” Stanley chastised. “Hit ’em with the stoic defiance, dude. Go out in style.”

  Stanley clamped down on his jaw and crossed his arms as two zombies set to work tearing him apart. To his credit, he held his composure to the end.

  EIGHTY-ONE

  “Any more surprises I need to know about?” Leon said, once again allowing Rainbow Eyes to assist him with the finer points of walking. They’d barely made it down a length of hall after their encounter with the interdimensional being in the old theater.

  “You might want to brace yourself for what’s around the next corner.”

  Leon’s sour face eked out a sigh entirely in character with it.

  Laney nearly toppled the two of them over as Leon’s and Rainbow Eyes’ paths intersected hers. “Where’s my husband?” Laney said.

  “He’s off fighting Truman, putting an end to him once and for all, I would hope,” Leon said.

  “You let him go after him on his own?!”

  Leon grimaced. “It sounded like a good idea at the time. Of course, we were both a bit caught up in the bravado of the moment.”

  Laney turned to her juvenile Nomads. “Eat him!” she said, pointing to Leon.

  The Nomads jumped him, pinning him to the floor beneath their talons.

  Rainbow Eyes bent over Leon. “She clearly has no qualms about kicking a guy when he’s down. I think it runs in the family.”

  EIGHTY-TWO

  SOME HOURS EARLIER

  Once outside the FORESCO compound, Truman glanced up at the battle transpiring on the roof. Natty had gotten caught up in the blast radius of the latest explosion.

  He landed feet from him.

  The ill wind following in Truman’s wake, from the hangar inside the compound he was fleeing out of, blew the flames out that were currently encasing Natty. A pity.

  As Natty tried to clear the cobwebs and shake off the shell-shock, Truman calmly strapped on his helmet and kick-started the snow-mobile.

  Natty was coming to and eying him with contempt. Truman waited for him to get to his feet and said, “The idea was for you never to grow up - and face the implications of your designs - from any perspective other than a child's.”

  Recoiling from the latest blast, Natty witnessed the horror of the fight going on above him. “That way I'd never realize that some futures belong just in video games. Sorry for growing up, albeit belatedly, and spoiling all your plans.”

  He regarded Truman on the snow-mobile. It suddenly dawned on him the incongruity of the sight. He laughed. “It isn't snowing, Truman. Where do you plan to go on that thing?”

  Just then the sky opened up and it snowed as if heaven were clearing its inventory all at once, making the season illegal up there. Natty scowled, realizing. “Another of my inventions.”

  Truman throttled up the snow-mobile. “Well, if it makes you feel any better, making it rain in the desert isn't just good for starving people, it's good for business.” He turned his face up to enjoy the snow. “And making it snow on command, well, that's positively priceless.”

  He torpedoed down the mountain on his snow-mobile.

  There looked to be between three and four inches of snow on the ground already. But his confidence may also have been due in part to hi-tech modifications that could tear through rough patches better than your typical snow mobile.

  Natty grabbed one of the robots that had gotten blasted off the roof and had landed next to him. It was busy remaking itself over, with a little help from its robo-friends, as a giant robo-spider with gun turrets. The repairs completed on its morphing abilities, the little bugger handled the rest of the transformation on its own.

  As Natty jumped on the morphbot, the robot made a seat for him. It also sprouted some handholds on top of which were joy-stick-like controls. “Reads the intent of its human master! I wonder how I figured that one out?” He mumbled, “Why’s it being so accommodating to you might be the bigger question?”

  “You plan to put an end to Truman?” the morphbot said, earning yet another furrowed brow from Natty.

  “Yeah, so?”

  “That works for me. I’ve seen what he does to last year’s tech.”

  Natty pounced down the mountain after Truman using the vaulting ability of the robo-spider, and blasted at him with the robo-spider's assault weapons. He was making a spectacular mess of the mountainside, but so far, shooting wild. Maybe Leon was right; he should play more video games.

  This was the first time Natty had a chance to notice the changed terrain in the vicinity of FORESCO. It was more arid, less tropical, in the face of the energy shield thrown up to keep out migrating microorganisms that bred so freely in the tropics. The air felt electrically charged, as if the shield did no more than split the H20 molecules in the air into base hydrogen and oxygen. It did not extend yet above the compound, or their assault team would have noticed prior to descending the sheer cliff onto the FORESCO rooftop. Perhaps because the compound hadn’t been built up high enough yet. They should have noticed the drier air as they got closer to the roof. But by then, there were a lot of other factors competing for their attention.

  Natty scuttled out of the way of the hundred foot Goliath-Bots warring overhead. It was surreal gazing up at their drama from down here. It was bad enough watching them duke it out with one another in an earlier chapter of their lives, one he’d lived through as part of the ground crew converting downed Goliath-Bots to self-piloting mode. But now, wrestling with the Nomads, trying to get out of a clinch, the Nomad’s with their fiery breaths, the Goliath-Bots with their projectiles…

  He returned his eyes to the field when his peripheral vision alerted him he was about to collide head on with a tree. He was delighted he could find one still standing in a field of tussling giants.

  Further down the mountain, Natty struggled to hold on to the robo-spider, all the while marveling at how it knew what to do without being told. He understood that thoughts propagated from our heads like radio waves, and we just needed to figure out a way to read and decode them. That was the trick behind the skull caps used to pilot the Goliath-Bots hands-free. It hadn’t occurred to him to try and read these signals from a distance. At first blush, he couldn’t see how. I must have been a hell of a lot smarter as a kid. No small price to pay for being all grown up!

  The robo-spider hopped on top a boulder in order to make it easier to keep Truman in its sights. It fired away at him. Evidently it had decided its pilot was a lousy shot and he’d be better off with auto-fire mode.

  Maybe not.

  Natty looked on impressed at Truman's ability to dodge automatic rifle and rocket fire just by checking his side view mirrors.

  Natty was even more flabbergasted by the way the snow-mobile morphed into a bobsled, allowing Truman to rocket downhill much faster.

  Truman and his power vacations. To think I used to scoff at them.

  Without further ado, Natty levitated the spider with thrusters that emerged out of the spider's underside, and he waited patiently for the thing to finish shape-shifting into
a mini-jet fighter.

  Welcome to my toy-world, Truman.

  Natty flew after him, his mini-jet pelting the bobsled with explosive salvos.

  Both he and Truman had to avoid being blindsided by charging Nomads and Goliath-Bots with absolutely no awareness of their puny existence.

  At this pace, the challenge was ten times harder.

  ***

  Natty banked the fighter jet away from the leg of the Nomad, flying around it like one of those space missions that required slingshoting around the moon to achieve the necessary velocity. The analogy was painfully shattered before he finished gaining momentum as one of the Nomad’s fiery breaths—aimed at the Goliath-Bot he was tussling with—blew him off course. The wings of his jetfighter corkscrewing into a boulder.

  The autonav corrected for him, able to respond faster than his human reflexes. But it too was having trouble compensating for the air turbulence of a Nomad’s exhale. Too many eddies for a pair of flat wings to do much about.

  His morph-bot made the wings flap long enough to get them out of the situation, up and over the boulder, before morphing back to fighter-jet mode and hurtling towards Truman.

  Every hump Truman flew off of caused him to disappear briefly. Each time Natty flew over the same mound he realized he had no time to react to what was in front of him. The autonav was repeatedly saving his ass. The first time he’d flown into a passing flock of miniature droid jets. Their kite-like shapes and ram jet engines creating more slip currents to get lost in than the prior Nomad’s forced exhale. And throwing him up against even more obstacles than just the boulder. The droids had soared past him so fast, intent on their destination, it was doubtful they even detected him. They certainly made no effort to fly around him.

  The next mound to take Natty’s breath away required the autonav get him around a wall of trees. The wings of his jet had to be turned at a ninety degree angle to slip through the narrow slits separating the trees. That course in turn had to be corrected at warp speed before the “channel” turned into yet another wall.

  He found it curious Truman kept surviving the jumps; the near misses had to be even harder for him to get around than Natty, with his age contributing to his slowing. And Natty could find no evidence Truman was allowing himself the same cheats. Natty’s dashboard, plotting his course down the mountain, by way of the morphbot’s satellite-empowered tracking abilities, showed no change in rhythm with Truman’s descent as would be noticeable if autonav and human modes kept alternating.

  Along the slope of the mountain well beyond the compound, Natty finally scored a direct hit on Truman. “Woo hoo!” he shouted with satisfaction and jammed his fists in the air.

  He rapidly deflated as he watched Truman's blast-proof bobsled morph into a rocket.

  Truman launched himself off the ground and high into the sky.

  Not long after that, he shot completely out of the Earth’s atmosphere. It took the telemetry on his morphbot, currently tracking him, to confirm that, but confirm it, it did.

  “You've got to be freaking kidding me!” Natty screamed.

  He glanced down at his robot. “Can you do that?”

  The robot made disagreeable sounds as if it wasn’t convinced it wanted to do that.

  Finally, the thing morphed into something more gravity-proof. It grew up around Natty in a protective one-seater spacecraft with thermal and radiation shielding, and a curved transparent canopy, like the one over the head of a fighter-jet pilot. Though he had just been in jet fighter mode, it hadn’t dawned on him to grant himself such protections. More cocooned from the outside world than ever, he was already feeling the inrush of synthesized oxygen.

  Off he shot towards outer space.

  Oh, boy. I don’t like where this is headed.

  EIGHTY-THREE

  As the ship broke through Earth’s atmosphere, and there was suddenly nothing but stars, Natty wheezed. It seemed like an eternity before he could get his breathing back under control. As for this boldly going where few men have gone before… I think I preferred you as the paranoid cowering in the corner, hiding from his own shadow.

  A sight. More startling than the stars themselves, unfiltered by Earth’s atmosphere.

  Spacecraft were decloaking. Natty did a quick calculation of their combined volume and realized they could have come from the Coliseum-sized amphitheater in the FORESCO compound that Truman had fled. There had been a rush of wind behind him as he exited. At the time Natty thought it was due to the change in weather, as in the proverbial ill-wind that was likely to follow Truman anywhere. Natty was looking at some pretty damning evidence that he was wrong about the source of the breeze.

  Three skipping heartbeats later and the craft were all gone. Slipping through hyperspace. In more conventional terms, they had opened wormholes for themselves to scatter to the stars. With that technology they would not be limited to this solar system; not even to this galaxy.

  “What are you up to, Truman?”

  But that for another time.

  Today he had to put this madman out of business. Each day Truman was alive it was like a Singularity reaction gone bad; each day he was alive sped humanity and all life on earth decades into a future nobody wanted any part of.

  And Truman’s chief enabler? Natty. He had thus some of his own demons to wrestle with, chief among them, Truman.

  As Natty bore down on the throttle that would have him climbing up Truman’s ass soon enough, Natty thought about his more prolific younger years. Spaceships with cloaking devices. Star Cruisers that could hit “warp” speed at the press of a button. This was the stuff of the sci-fi books and TV series he’d loved as a kid. They must have gotten him thinking. Was Truman monitoring his doodling as early as then? Or was RevoCorp? Natty reflexively touched his head. As best as Natty could recall, Truman hadn’t taken the helm at RevoCorp until about five years ago.

  Natty tried to recall how he’d mastered the tech behind the morphing robots. A nano hive mind would be required powerful enough to figure out on its own how to morph the craft as needed, with the nanites themselves serving as the 3D printers necessary to procure the new solid matter demanded. For raw materials such as fuels and propellants suitable to the occasion to be supplied out of thin air the nanites would need to tap zero point energy, to convert the energy of the void itself into matter—the specific matter they needed. Everything from matter-antimatter propulsion to nuclear fusion to more primitive chemical propellants. Would growing up mean ceasing to be so creatively impressive? Because that would be a terrible price to pay.

  ***

  Closing in on the moon, as he continued chasing Truman's ship, Natty watched the CEO of his firm land his space cruiser at a moon colony landing dock.

  Natty stared slack-jawed at the elaborate base. “Another of my designs, no doubt.” Mostly underground though, explaining why some backyard astronomer on Earth hasn’t picked up on it. Throwing his hands up in the air, he shouted, “Okay, I learned my lesson! No more treating the solar system as my personal sand box.” With even bigger gestures, he added, “From now on, I leave screwing up the future to other people. Damn handsome moon colony, though, you gotta admit.”

  The part of the geodesic dome that showed above ground would have made Buckminster Fuller proud, even if the faceting of the triangular panes that formed it had to be disguised. Nothing like light reflecting off at odd angles when it came to screaming “not natural.”

  ***

  As the robo-consciousness of his ship brought Natty in closer from the big picture view to a precision landing, he said to the AI, “Ah, not to get overly personal, but you think you could hump my face and rub up against me?”

  The robot sighed, then covered Natty in a re-breather/face-mask combo, and a space suit so he could walk the rest of the way to the station.

  Once at the entrance to the moon base, Natty hammered at the locked door with his fists, shouting, “Room service!” After waiting a second and getting no response he said, �
�Got a fist for your hungry ass!” More to himself, he mumbled, “What's with all the homoerotic humor?” He mumbled to the robot, “You can't hump me anymore, okay? Seems to do strange things to my mind.”

  He cocked his hand, ready to punch in the door. The robot immediately reconfigured itself around him to empower his punch. Thusly fortified, he punched a hole in the airlock, and got blown into outer space for his efforts by the depressurizing insides. “Okay,” he gasped. “Maybe not the best idea.”

  He looked down at his feet when just thinking about what he wanted produced no results. “Do I have to paint you a picture?”

  More disgruntled sounding murmurings came from the robot, as Natty's boots were souped up with rocket thrusters and he flew his suit back towards the compound.

  With each step, still more dissatisfied sounds came from the robot. “So get a union rep, already?” Natty balked. “Pay your dues like everybody else.”

  He heard Laney giggling in his head. “Laney?” Suddenly he remembered. “The clip-on mindchip over your all-seeing third eye! Well, that idea is finally paying dividends.” Fluffing up with a big breath that helped his chest stand out, he said, “Watch me now!”

  He was rather grateful she wasn’t reading him the riot act. She had to be scared out of her mind for what he was about to do. He knew he was.

  It dawned on him there should be some time delay between communications from the Earth to the moon. In promoting psychic abilities, had the mindchip found a way around that? Did the nature of telepathy transcend distance and time? A tantalizing prospect to explore another time, Natty. The main point for now was that he got to show off for his wife.

  ***