Super World

by Lawrence Ambrose

  "Let's break into one of these platforms," she said. "Barry – "

  Hulk Horner had already wound up and punched one of the lower rings, his arm penetrating nearly to his elbow. The material closed around his arm, and Horner growled with the effort of pulling it free. The hole his fist had left sealed up in moments. It's like the kung-fu of materials, Jamie thought.

  "Fuck," Horner grunted, rubbing his forearm. "I hate this alien shit."

  "Everyone" – it was Tildie – "strike the platform hard where Hulk just buried his fist!"

  Jamie recognized Tildie's premonition voice and did as she was told. So did everyone else. The forward edge of the nearest rings warped inward, sizzling and contorting under the fusillade of super powers. Then there was a camera flash – the closest description of the bright multi-colored light she'd glimpsed – and Jamie found herself discorporating. She resisted – felt the drag of her body against an unseen force.

  In the next instant she was drifting in space.

  Outer space. Stars everywhere, but nothing remotely familiar. Disorientation and panic fought a pitched battle in her head for a few moments before becoming fierce allies. It was like waking up in an unfamiliar motel room at the edge of an unknown galaxy.

  A few seconds later, Jamie realized she wasn't alone. First, the "corpse" of Amelrina's synthetic floated nearby. Further out, she discerned other human shapes. She opened her mouth to shout, but of course no sound emerged.

  A brilliant, glowing cloud flared up nearby – a miniature sun that lit up a dozen drifting figures, including one distinctive brunette. Belinda. Lighting a beacon. Jamie moved toward the plasma cloud as it flickered into darkness like fading coals. Belinda released another plasma burst, and Jamie took the opportunity to pull all the figures she could see to her. They met in a cluster around Belinda.

  Everyone was conscious, but some – Terry, Thomas, and Steven – were obviously hurting. Jay and Brian Loving didn't look too happy, either. The augmented bodies of even the weakest of them were strong enough to withstand space for a short time – that had been proven in the DARE labs – but time was short.

  Steven was signaling with his hands, alternately extending them out – seemingly to Brian and Jay, which he was nodding urgent encouragement to – and clasping them together. Jamie took the message to be that they join together with the two teleporters. Was he thinking they could escape to N-Space by doubling up on their power? She knew from painful personal experience it was possible to share a space with a teleporter, but was too fuzzyheaded to recall the fine details of DARE's teleportation experiments. She'd just have to trust Steven's judgment right now.

  She grabbed Brian and Jay's wrists and dragged them together, loosening her grip as they grimaced. Following Steven's gestures, the group huddled together between the two men and everyone joined hands. Steven made eye contact with the two teleporters and started mouthing out a countdown. 5...4...3...2 –

  One. Jamie felt the familiar buzz as the starry universe around her filmed over. Then a collective gasp of twelve people taking their first breath in several minutes. After some grateful breathing, Tildie spoke.

  "Now this really sucks," she said. "Talk about from the frying pan into the fire."

  "I believe that orb is the core world – where we just were," said Steven, pointing. Everyone attempted to follow his finger. "The bluish-red sphere."

  "Why?" asked Jay. "For all we know we could be in another universe or a million light years away from that place."

  "Possibly. But teleportation requires vast amounts of energy, and the evidence thus far indicates that even this civilization requires launch and destination power sources - gateways - for interdimensional travel. They probably intended to send us a greater distance, but were resisted. And that sphere's light indicates an anomalous energy source considering its lack of proximity to –"

  "Whatever," Jake broke in. "Like we really need genius here to explain the fine points. He thinks that's our target, so let's quit dicking around and get there." He looked to Brian and Jay. "You can get us there, right?"

  Brian and Jay eyed each other.

  "I'm not sure," said Jay. "In space I run out of energy pretty quickly."

  "Use the others as an energy source." Steven's clipped tone made it sound too obvious for words. "Maintain body contact to the fullest extent possible."

  After some skeptical and distasteful looks – particularly between Thomas Mayes and the "Mayhem Brothers" – they jammed together and were on their way toward the blue-red sphere, with Amelrina's avatar body jammed between them. The sphere swelled slowly into what appeared to be an airless world pockmarked by craters. Only the faint blue-reddish glow hinted of something more.

  "I was right," said Steven.

  "What's the plan?" asked Tildie.

  Jamie looked to their resident genius.

  "Penetrate their core world as far as we can," Steven replied. "Then use the synthetic body to re-access the original room – if they haven't changed the code. The concentric platforms likely contain their organic forms."

  "Will they have changed the codes?" Jamie asked.

  "If they're smart. We can only hope they haven't had time."

  On that encouraging note, they approached the hopefully core world.

  "Straight to the center," said Jamie. Jay and Brian grimly nodded. "When we get there, full aggression this time – starting with those circular compartments. I don't want a repeat of last time."

  Here we go. As usual, Jamie couldn't escape the feeling of being along for the ride. So much of what happened now was up to the fates or random chance. All she could do was give it her all when the time came. There was a threadbare comfort in that.

  The surface of the sphere gave way silently to inner rooms and hallways, passing in a blur. Even at their current speed, which she guessed to be two or three hundred miles per hour, this could take a while. The sphere could be Earth-sized for all she knew.

  "We're coming under attack," Tildie announced.

  Jamie and the others braced themselves. Sometimes Tildie's 4-5 second warning wasn't all that helpful, as Jake's scornful glance at her suggested. An array of varicolored light-beams struck their phantom zone, transforming it into a prismic disco show, accompanied by the high-pitched whine like a thousand enraged mosquitoes. Suddenly, the walls and floors they were passing through seemed to thicken, gain traction on their bodies. At first it was as if they were hitting walls of wind – but then the wind gelled into something akin to water. Jamie started to feel each wall slapping her body, with even more force than when she'd been plowing through solid matter outside N-Space. Their progress slowed to a fast jog.

  "Focus and increase your energy," said Steven, sounding as distant and calm as always. "Concentrate on resuming descent."

  Jamie willed them onward, and from the determined expressions around her the others were doing the same. They began to pick up speed. Soon the walls were blurring past them again. The light beams ceased their assault.

  "Now what?" Jake murmured. "They're just gonna let us march right in through their front door and blow them to hell?"

  "Our defenses appear adequate within N-Space," said Steven. "They would not be capable of teleporting us within this protective field."

  "But we can't do anything to them from in here, either," Jamie said.

  "Untrue. We can gain critical access to their holding tank or tanks by teleporting within. Once we have access to their organic forms, they may be defenseless."

  Moments passed as those words sank in. Jamie was nodding along with the others.

  "I'll say one thing for your boy here, Mayes," Jake said. "He is a fucking Einstein."

  "He ain't my boy." Thomas's features were set in hard ebony planes. "Ain't yours, neither. And he's smarter than Einstein."

  "Don't get all butt-hurt, Mandingo. I was complimenting the kid. We're a team now, in case you hadn't noticed."

  "I ain't no member of your team."

  "When
it came down to it, you fought at our side," said Horner, drawing some surprised looks – not the least of which from Thomas Mayes. "In my book, that makes you one of us, even if you are an asshole."

  "I'm an asshole?" Thomas appeared more amazed than offended.

  "We're all assholes," Jake chuckled. "Under the skin. Once you get past my pretty face, I am, too, believe it or not."

  "You can trust him on that," laughed Denise, squeezing his hand. Jake laughed with her, but Jamie noted the flash of tenderness and fear in his eyes. They might be a team, but some of them had more than team feelings for each other. She had no doubt that the couples in their group – Tildie and Jay, Belinda and Greg, Jake and Denise – would not hesitate to give up their lives for each other.

  A theory that might be tested very soon, Jamie thought, as they entered the largest chamber so far, home to the pyramid of concentric shapes. Without a word, Brian and Jay hit the brakes. They drifted toward the dome centrally located atop the pyramid.

  "Let's take a moment," said Jamie.

  They stopped a few feet above the dome, which measured five or six meters across.

  "We just teleport through and kill everyone inside," said Jake. "Doesn't seem too complex to me."

  "How sure are we that all the people controlling the ship are here?" Jay asked.

  "Amelrina said five people." Jamie shrugged. "If there are five here, that should be it."

  "Until some other murdering alien psychopaths send another ship," said Jake.

  "According to Amelrina, that might not happen for a long time, if ever."

  "There's no point in even worrying about it," said Tildie. "We need to save our world now, whatever happens in the future."

  Still, the idea of just barging in there and killing people – beings possibly centuries if not millennia old – didn't sit well with Jamie. She was reminded of her grandmother telling her that God might seem unjust because "we don't see the bigger picture the way He does." Her grandmother could never quite define what the "bigger picture" was, other than that it was beyond human comprehension. Jamie had never bought into the notion, but right now it was making more sense. What would she or any of them do if they had near-certain knowledge that a society would eventually threaten the universe? It was like the old "Would you kill Hitler?" question. Or Minority Report's "pre-crime."

  "Okay, let's do it," she said. "But hold off on lethal force until I say. I want to give them a chance to surrender."

  "Isn't that the mistake we made last time?" Jake was staring at her with cold question.

  "There's no guarantee that killing them will stop the ship from blowing up Earth."

  "That's correct," said Steven.

  "So what are we supposed to do?" Tildie asked. "Argue our case with them? Do you really think we could point out something they missed?"

  "I don't know. But Amelrina herself suggested we try reasoning with them. If that doesn't work..." She shrugged. "We go to Plan B." She turned to Brian Loving. "How's your thought-reading power working? Can you pick up anything from them?"

  "Nothing from here, but I can't read outside people's thoughts while in N-Space." He gave her a half-apologetic smile. "I can hear all your thoughts, though, except Steven's."

  "Great." Jamie breathed in. "Okay. Let's do this. Stay focused. And no lethal force until I say."

  They descended as a group through the dome and into a dim chamber where five male figures in shiny silver coveralls hovered a few meters apart in a cocoon of greenish light, each figure occupying what appeared to be the corner of an invisible pentagram. Their exposed heads were bald, pale, smooth, and oversized relative to their bodies. Jamie had the impression of adult-featured babies in a half-lit hospital nursery.

  "Man, they look like sleeping warlocks or something," Tildie whispered. "Let's hope they don't curse us or whatever."

  "When we dematerialize," said Jamie, pushing creepy thoughts from her head, "Joy, I want you to confuse their minds as much as possible. Kyle – make them as sleepy as possible. Jay and Brian, teleport them out of this chamber, if you can. If that doesn't work, the rest of us will blast the walls around them to try and take out their energy sources." Jamie turned to Steven. "Unless you have some better ideas?"

  "Your plan seems logical."

  "Okay. On three."

  The instant they materialized the greenish glow around the five figures burst into a brilliant white. They could no longer see the men. Jamie could barely see her hand in front of her face as her vision struggled to recover.

  "I can't get a fix on them," Jay shouted.

  Through a white haze – like the whiteout of a North Dakota winter blizzard – Jamie made out the others as fuzzy, ghostly figures, most of them shading their eyes or grimacing. It was as if a silent mini-nuke had exploded in the room. And she'd had about all she could take of mini-nukes.

  "Hit them!" she shouted hoarsely. "Full lethal force!"

  Her telekinetic pulse didn't pack much wallop. She felt a weakness that her sluggish mind identified as beyond being stunned by a brilliant flash of light. A blast of radiation? Around her, Tildie's lightning crackled weakly, Belinda's plasma discharge fizzled a few feet from her outstretched hands, and Barry's particle beam resembled a weak flashlight's. Horner managed a gimpy kick off the floor that propelled him toward the incandescent cloud in slow-motion, but when he reached it he was jolted backward as if he'd been drop-kicked – flying past Jamie and bouncing against the wall behind them.

  "Thomas!" Steven – his voice raised in a rare shout. "Tell them to stop!"

  Thomas Mayes was curled up in a fetal ball, his face squinched up as if he were having unanaesthetized groin surgery.

  "Stop..." The word escaped as whispery hiss through his clenched lips.

  "Louder! Shout it!"

  "Stop." Thomas made a crunching noise in his throat. "Stop!"

  Jamie wasn't sure if it was her imagination, but she felt an immediate lessening of her strange, debilitating malaise.

  "Stop attacking us!"

  The ball of light enclosing the five aliens dimmed.

  "That's right, Mayes!" Jake snarled out a laugh. "Tell those alien honkies what's up!"

  "Stop all that hostile shit, aliens!" Thomas roared, unfolding his body, recovering his strength along with everyone else. "You our friends, now, motherfuckers!"

  The light around the aliens had returned to its original dull green glow. Everyone looked at each other in disbelieving wonder. Did that just happen? Beings advanced beyond imagining just took orders from Thomas Mayes?

  The sudden appearance of a stranger in their midst made everyone jump. He appeared to be in his late-forties or early fifties, wearing white coveralls - the calm, intelligent, kindly face of a concerned doctor making his rounds.

  "I thought we could talk," he said.

  Jamie's thought to flatten him died half-formed. The tension in the others suggested he was a hair's breadth away from oblivion. Assuming they could destroy him. Then she realized he was a "synthetic," probably from one of the core selves floating in the green light ten meters away.

  "You're one of them?" Jamie asked.

  "All five of them."

  The team circled him warily, with one eye on the floating figures.

  "You want to discuss our decision to terminate your world," he said.

  "You might want to discuss whether we terminate your ass," said Jake. "Asses. Because the way I heard it, we do that, and you won't be back in our neighborhood for a thousand years."

  "That's one possible outcome. But even so, we, or someone like us, will inevitably return."

  "But by then it will be too late. We'll be a Stage Six or whatever the fuck you call it by then." Jake closed in on him, his teeth reflecting the pale green light harshly as he smiled. "We'll be coming for you, partner, and we won't stop coming until we own this and every other fucking universe in every fucking alternative dimension. Then we'll be the ones deciding what worlds become extinct."

  If t
he man/synthetic felt threatened or annoyed, his serene patrician's face gave no indication of it. But his eyes never left Jake's sneering face. Jake leaned in closer, until their noses were centimeters from touching.

  "You know why, asshole? Because we're the fucking human race, that's why. Ain't you or any other chickenshit hoity-toity alien gonna decide our fate."

  "Amen to that, brother," said Thomas Mayes. "If anyone's gonna fuck us up it's gonna be us that do the fuckin."

  "You seem to have a uniquely sexual perspective toward existence."

  The synthetic said it without a trace of irony or a smile. Tildie and Belinda let out uneasy laughs. It occurred to Jamie that Jake sounded exactly like the aliens' worst nightmare – his promise of aggression the very destructive force they'd predicted.

  "I'm tired of the talking," said Horner. "Let's finish these clowns while we still can, before it's too late."

  He lurched past the synthetic toward the floating figures. Jamie caught his wrist.

  "Hold on, Hulk," she said. She turned to Jake. "You do realize that you're talking about doing exactly what they predicted we'd do – their main reason for ending us?"

  Jake's defiant shrug had an uncomfortable edge.

  "He doesn't speak for me," said Tildie.

  "Not for me, either," said Jay. Several of the others murmured their dissent.

  "Me, neither," Thomas stated. "The boy is suffering bad from White Man's Disease. And I ain't talkin' lack of vertical. They gotta stomp down everything until they on top."

  "Didn't you want to rule the world, Thomas?" the synthetic asked.

  "Can't deny it, but I ain't lookin' to rule no universe. I'm happy to leave that big Nubian night out there to my space brothers. Tell the truth, I kinda lost the urge to make everyone do my biddin'. Gets boring after awhile, you know?"

  The synthetic gave him a faint nod and smile. "And you, Commander Shepherd?"

  Jamie knew she shouldn't be surprised this creature knew her by name. "The answer is no, I'm not looking to rule the universe. Why bother? There's infinite space, and we have enough of a challenge ruling ourselves. And I think most of the leaders in my world would feel the same way."