Victor’s scrutiny of Soren’s expression came with some condescension. “Careful, Soren. This is one very dangerous road you’re on—that you’re taking us all down.”
“But maybe necessary,” Naomi said, drifting down from the rafters above; prior to now, no one was really conscious of her being in the room. She took over control of the desktop computer screens, pushing Ry and An out of the way. “Cosmos has a piece of the key for decoding the language,” Naomi explained. “She’s giving you access now to what they were able to unlock in her time—when they first encountered the master race that created this magic.”
“The master race? So, another alien race on par with the Fenquin.” Victor smiled. “Lovely.” Soren understood the reason for the smile. The only thing better for Victor than getting a leg up on one cosmic wizard at a time, was getting a leg up on two. “What happened to the master race that engineered this magic?”
“It is believed they are no more,” Cosmos answered. Her voice altered from Naomi’s, older, more self-assured, and a lot more bullish.
Victor glanced at Soren. “I see Cosmos and Naomi are getting along better than ever.”
“They’re enjoying a period of détente,” Soren replied.
Victor turned to Lar. “Take note, buddy, you too can get your alters to communicate better. Soren and the beast apparently got to the party ahead of the rest of us with this idea of entertaining more than one self inside the body at a time. I’m almost jealous.”
“There, that’s all we could make of the magic. We, that is to say, the CSA, never got any further,” Cosmos said, applying the last keystrokes.
“Any theories as to why the master race engineered this coup, taking their power and control over the cosmos to the nest level, only to disappear?” Victor asked Cosmos.
“We believe the magic isn’t just a list of incantations and formulas; we believe the thing that holds it together, makes it all work is a conscious entity, an evolving algorithm that the AI engineered to make sense of the magic.”
“So, we did discover another cosmic wizard—and not a lightweight like Cosmos here,” Victor said, fluffing up again, his muscles bulging once more as if he’d just stepped out of the gym.
Cosmos just smiled condescendingly.
“How come I don’t rile you more?” Victor asked her. “Soren, for that matter? From what I gather of you, you don’t like people who break the rules, you by-the-book authoritarian drone.”
Soren wondered why Victor set out to provoke her, but then reminded himself that this was Victor.
“By comparison with cosmic-grade wizards performing dark magic—with or without hi-tech assist—I’m afraid you’re too cosmically insignificant to get on my radar.” She smiled even more dismissively than before, enjoying the flushing, fuming face on Victor, before receding into the background and granting Naomi full control of her body again.
Victor relaxed when he picked up on the beat change, realizing he was no longer glaring at Cosmos, but at Naomi.
The beast roared. The acoustic blast keyed to shatter every electronic component in the lab. When he was done, the computer printer was still spitting out toys for the AIs—it was the only thing working, and it was anybody’s guess who it was actually taking orders from at that point. The beast summarily plodded over to the printer and smashed it to bits with his fist.
Victor had his arm out, fully intending to protect the printer by slipping it through a portal the beast couldn’t access, but he backed down at the last moment. And instead, he just groaned, pinched his nose at the point where it joined his forehead. “Let me guess. The beast thinks he has enough to work with to take it from here—before we risk raising yet another virtual god we have no idea how to get around.”
The beast backhanded him into the wall until he was flush with it, embossed in over a foot of metal-composite; before grabbing Victor’s arm, holding it out and opening a portal for himself with it. The beast stepped through the portal and was gone; the access point to Soren’s lab closing behind him.
“I’m going to go with, ‘I hit that nail squarely on the head,” Victor said, prying himself out of the wall. “That guy should really think of extending his vocabulary past a few grunts and groans. As for the roars…” Victor glanced around the wrecked lab. “Any chance we can salvage the data, if nothing else?”
His four transhumanist geeks were locked in a conference call, parlaying through that group mind way they had of linking up. Aeros was already shaking his head, and now so were the others. “That sonic blast crippled the AIs throughout the transhumanist sector we were linked to,” Aeros explained, “just enough to send a message.”
“They’ll be back on line in a couple of hours,” Airy explained. “If not for Soren’s reputation, he’d have the whole district on him.”
Ry grunted. “Talk about a bunch of people you don’t want to piss off. As it is, most of them think what he’s up to is uber-cool.”
An snorted. “I forgot what it was like to be eighteen—forever, like so many of these nano-enhanced kids that just refuse to grow up, and have the tech to grant that wish—and so many others.”
“I forgot what it’s like to trust someone besides myself to take the lead,” Victor said. “Soren and the beast could end up doing just what the beast was hoping to avoid by cutting us out of the loop. They’ve got a lot less mind power to throw at the problem.”
“Not sure any of us knows what the beast is plugged into,” Naomi said. “The cabbalistic magic that was a baby formula for the Fenquin queen—there may be a fertility magic wrapped up with it that is not unlike Vima’s womb magic. Only far more powerful—and keyed to other master races. Wouldn’t a mother want its child to sense when danger was near? How else could it do that? What else could truly be a threat to it?”
Naomi flew up and out of the skylights. “Since when did she get so profound? And since when can she fly?” Victor held out his hand to heal the skylight’s shattered glass. “I tell you, I’m not sure who’s coming of age drama is more annoying around here.” He panned his attention to the savant baby, still cocooned, nestled between the other children her mother and father had raised; the father the only of the two parents remaining in the picture.
“Adult coming of age dramas are all the rage, Victor,” Aeros said smiling sadistically. “Haven’t you heard? Piaget failed to identify all the developmental stages in life. Adults go through major paradigm shifts in their consciousness throughout their life cycle; not just children.”
The others sheltered their amusement at Victor’s expense by attending to the new equipment already being flown in by quadcopters. Much of the room had already been cleaned up by the utility janitorial droids. It was unclear what any of them should be doing prior to getting their marching orders from Soren and the beast. Until then, Victor presumed they’d be doing the smart thing, uploading backup copies of themselves to the cloud in case they didn’t survive the next encounter with the Fenquin queen.
“Ah, guys, we still have this,” Aeros said with a smile, picking the chip off the floor that had been wedged into the back of the book that Catpain Klutz had stumbled on to.
“And that I suspect is the answer to everything,” Lar said, taking the chip out of Aeros’s hands.
Victor grew alarmed. “The last person I want getting ahold of that chip is Captain Klutz.”
“On the contrary. Who better to get you inside now that the beast has blocked all conventional avenues of access for you. And this is Influx, by the way. I’m the one with access to all of my alters.”
Victor smiled. He should have gathered as much from the voice change; this personality sounded, well… a bit scary, like he harbored secrets he wasn’t willing to share, and wielded sacrosanct powers of his own. Victor liked him already. “Finally. I wonder what brought you to the surface.”
“I think I’m the one who built this chip,” Influx replied, unable to get his eyes off of it.
The others threw glances at one ano
ther.
“Stop it, Influx. Too much smiling in one day isn’t good for me.” Victor’s grin just got wider. “My muscles will be sore as hell come tomorrow.”
Victor’s mind circled around the possibilities. For Influx to be the one who designed that chip—he might well have been dragged back from the future by Soren; both of them forgetting what had transpired according to as of yet unidentified reasons for repressing the information. Influx, could, of course, simply be referring to a future-life version of himself he was getting in touch with; Maybe what Naomi had was catching. But theories were equally fun to consider, because if either were true, it meant Influx was not in possession of the whole picture. He was a more integrated personality than the others, sure, but still not the one with access to all of Lar’s alters. My, my, such good fortune, and in the middle of End Times, no less.
THIRTY-NINE
Naomi flew through the open skylight of Soren’s lab. He was either looking to vent noxious fumes produced by whatever experiment he was engaged in, or he was expecting her; the overhead windows were seldom left ajar.
The lab looked like it once did—before Natura turned it into a nature preserve. The old movie set-vibe had settled in from the Frankenstein movies of the 1930s and 40s. The place resembled a steampunk-era take on tech: brass and copper pipe fittings adorned most everything; the warehouse was crowded with strange apparatuses; and, of course, Soren’s electric chair for bringing him back to life if his nanites had surpassed their limits was suitably spotlit. And over, more to the center of the floor, just south of his autopsy table on which he did his nano-enhancements on others, was the converted fish farm tank with the NASA-liquid solution—which Soren had, of course, tweaked—that fostered his time travel journeys.
Soren was passing his hand over his older nanite machines. “What are you up to?” she asked. Her psychic link with him was down; for whatever reason, the beast was keeping her out of Soren’s head; never a good sign. Whatever he was up to, he or Soren knew it would either terrify her, or worse.
“I’m thinking of the celestial wizard who paid me a visit when I died the first time. He actually seemed to be one of the good guys.”
“You think he might be the one pulling your strings, helping you to navigate the hurdles to becoming a celestial wizard?”
“Maybe,” he said, without shifting his fetishistic attention away from his devices. “All I know for now is that he touched the items in my lab in a specific order. Why touch more than one if one was all I needed to fend off the first celestial wizard nemesis we came up against? Maybe the other ones pertained to the other challenges I would face.”
“I think you’re reading too much in. I think you’re lonely and afraid and could use a friend in his weight class right now. And I think he was right when he told you he couldn’t do much more than encourage you to not give up. The rest was up to you. We’re born alone and we die alone, Soren. All the rebirths in the world can’t change that.”
Soren snorted. “Perhaps.” He turned to face her. “Maybe you’re muse enough. I think you might have just given me the missing piece I need.”
“I thought that was the black magic Lar gave you access to.”
“With it, I’ll know how to work the recipe of magics we have at our disposal, when to stir in which ingredients. The rest I’ll have to do from feel as we won’t have access to all the oversoul information, just some. But you’ve given me the answer to how to do more with less.”
Her face already communicated discomfort from the muscles snaking into an ever more bewildered expression. “And what answer is that?”
“The Fenquin queen will be weakest during her rebirths.”
“We have no way of knowing when the next one will be. It could be millions of years from now.”
“I disagree. When we came back to earth, she let us go without a fight. She didn’t need our psychic energy anymore; she had all she needed to morph.”
Naomi broke eye contact to consider the implications. “So, it’s begun then, her metamorphosis.”
“Yes, I believe so.”
She shifted her gaze sharply back to him, and her tone was every bit as sharp. “And so the time to strike is now.”
“Yes.”
“Are you ready?”
“No. But you helped me once before. And you were a lot less powerful then. I wonder what we can accomplish together now?”
She smiled and hugged him. They kissed. After the swordplay of tongues and the final parry, she stepped back. “Out of curiosity,” she said, “Is sex magic the first ingredient of the recipe?”
“It is now.”
FORTY
Most of Soren’s hive minds had migrated over to Naomi. That great exodus started even before they could finish peeling one another’s clothes off. The “designer tattoos” looked more artful on her than they did on him; though that was hardly what mattered.
She was using her psychic mind-meld energy which she’d used to link their minds many times before, but at a higher level. Now she had to get as far inside the beast’s mind, not just his, and she had to navigate all the other magics Soren and the beast had cooked up since the last time their lovemaking involved this much of a union of souls. Sex was one thing; even day-to-day lovemaking didn’t involve all this; it would be too terrifying and too exhausting to get this inside one another’s heads each time they came together.
As masterful as Naomi was at absorbing other forms of magic—she was a Sponger, after all, a type of paranormal who was given to doing just that—she needed the help of Soren’s hive minds to take in everything. The beast still wasn’t granting access to all his secrets, including the cabbalistic magic.
More disconcerting still was the presence of yet a third party—Cosmos. It seemed whenever Soren and Naomi tried to link their souls so completely, instead of opening a bridge to one another across all seven chakras—as Soren’s chi magic fired up—instead they opened a hole in space-time to some other entity. This time around was turning out to be no exception.
Naomi hadn’t used her Sponger magic in ages. Soren hadn’t used his chi magic in nearly as long.
Mercifully, Cosmos had no interest in Soren’s and Naomi’s shared passion; Naomi sensed Cosmos instead was engaging with the beast; together they were working on the shortcut to the oversoul by way of the A.I. Gene—encoded by a master race alien civilization to give rise to both the wizard and his associated black magic. They were calling what they were cooking up Zone Magic—for its propensity to center the person not in any one lifetime—but across all lifetimes—by mimicking access to the oversoul.
But even working together, Cosmos and the beast couldn’t crack the nature of the Zone Magic. And so, they were drawing in Naomi; pulling her focus from Soren toward the two of them.
Soren, sensing Naomi’s loss of concentration on their lovemaking, rather than fighting it, joined the three-way going on in back of his head—but by an indirect route. He opened up access to his mindchip, and there he started writing algorithms to handle what the beast, Cosmos, and Naomi couldn’t.
It was working. The four of them, sharing one another’s mind space, started accessing the most significant, life-altering memories from other lifetimes. The expanded memory space of his mindchip was allowing for more and more past and future life information to pour in. The beast’s command of cabbalistic magic also allowed for the inrush of more oversoul information without frying their minds.
But then the Zone Magic itself took over, with a life all its own. The oversoul’s mimic started to store and project the information each of the four parties needed access to—the pertinent skills they had at one time in another past life—or would have in a future life one day—to help them deal with the Fenquin queen.
Soren realized that the time had come to involve the rest of the sidekicks. With the Zone Magic in play, they could now get everyone in position to make their move against the Fenquin queen.
FORTY-ONE
“He’s u
p to something no good, I can feel it,” Makya declared staring at Augustus, the wizard seated in a lotus position, his hand out in front of him, calling up one cabbalistic image after another. The strange shapes—part complex geometries, part living lifeforms that resembled bacteria and fungi and protozoa under a microscope—glowed in front of him briefly before the holograms disappeared, to be replaced by others.
Aba smiled but the gesture conveyed a similar measure of concern. “He’s using the cabbalistic magic to reach out to the hibernating dragon morphs.”
“Why?” Heshima asked, stepping forward, rankled by the subterfuge and sensing what she was certain was a dishonorable act. She drove her spear’s shaft into the ground, pulling up chi energy through it, which sparked from the tip of the spear; the lightning fingers enveloped her head like a Tesla bulb, forcing a calm, centered, emptiness in which to invite the insights she needed to make more sense of what Augustus was up to.
“He’s hoping they’ll agree to let him act as liaison to the Fenquin queen and to other dangers great enough to threaten them, in exchange for…”
“Their secrets, starting with the elixir of immortality,” Heshima finished. She hissed her disapproval.
“He’s leveraging their fear, pretending to be the only one among them with the courage to do what’s needed.” Aba’s expression conveyed a similar disdain.
“He’ll help to vanquish their enemies for them, alright, all the while finding more, so they have reason to remain in hibernation while he remains the sole awakened dragon morph—protected from them and protected from the dangers on this side by us.” Makya growled. “If I used my ancestors that way, I’d be toast.”
“How can you be so certain of his treachery?” Savita asked Aba.
Aba snorted. “I’ve always been able to see into the minds of cowards better than most. But I suspect Soren and the Beast are sharing just enough of their mind link with their entourage and with me as can benefit each of us.”
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