“Prove it.”
“Who do you think is talking to you now? Oh yeah,” he said addressing the startled look in her eyes. “The real me is asleep over there on the couch. I’ll go wake him if something comes up that I can’t handle, or if I sense his own life is in danger. Say the real me is going into cardiac arrest. Or if I know the real me wouldn’t want to be left out of whatever juicy crime, I, the doppelganger, is in the middle of solving.”
“What’s to prevent me from going and sitting on the invisible you?”
“It just won’t occur to you to sit over there. The parts of our minds that can accommodate one another’s needs if it’s no big deal have been doing so since time immemorial. Even an albatross, future-hater, change-killer like you, knows that.”
She took a deep breath and held it as long as she could. “How long has this been going on?”
“Just since you two went AWOL. We’ve been carrying your weight. Now look at me all condescending and disapproving, I dare you.”
She softened on the awareness. “How did you get the city grid AI to sign off on that?”
“Law enforcement gets certain gratis not afforded the general public, you know that.”
She shifted her attention back to Torin. It only now dawned on her that his feverish experimentation had a focus: himself. He was biopsying himself and sticking needles where the sun don’t shine, and then making use of diagnostic imaging to allow his eyes to go places they couldn’t without augmentation. Davenport decided to take an interest at the same time she did. “God, you’d think he was trying to prove to himself he’s alive,” Davenport said.
Torin swiveled around on his desk chair and regarded him. “That’s exactly what I’m trying to do, among other things.”
“Don’t do this to me, Doc,” Davenport said. “I need to know that the most happy-go-lucky guy I know, who lives to be excited like only a child can, has the best coping mechanism of all. Because, quite frankly, if mine doesn’t work out, I’m dying to try that one on for size.”
Torin furrowed his brows. “It never occurred to you when you found our Jackson Pollocks smeared across the wall that we might actually be dead?”
Davenport shook his head. “Not for a second.”
“Why not?” Torin and Kendra said at the same time. In her case, her tone conveyed defensiveness, in his case, it conveyed dumbfoundedness.
“Oldest trick in the books. It’s the only way anyone can get some vacation time around here. Hell, I’ve swept JB’s remains off the floor of the police locker room I don’t know how many times. The last time he had to use up his sick time to play dead because he’d already used up all his vacation time from his prior murder.”
It was Kendra’s turn to shake her head and roll her eyes. “No wonder I ended up in Torin’s arms. He’s the last person on the planet besides me passionate about anything.”
“Hey, we all care about our jobs,” Davenport said, sounding a bit defensive himself. “But burnout is burnout. And what kind of cops would we be if we let that happen? So you just rein in your righteous indignation, sweetheart.”
“As I was saying,” Torin said, deciding he’d had enough of these two bickering, “as best as I can tell, we’re not really here. I’ll have to replicate the tests on you, Kendra, to be sure, but…”
“But…” she said.
“But these are just projections of the real us, like Davenport’s doppelgangers.”
“You were listening this whole time?” Davenport said. “This guy is amazing. Now if I could multitask like that…”
“Shut up!” Kendra and Torin shouted at him.
“Sorr—rry!”
“Take out your gun and shoot me, Davenport,” Torin said.
“Gladly.” He took out his gun and pointed. “No, seriously? You want me to pull the trigger in front of the cameras?”
“We can delete the footage later,” Torin said, waving his hand dismissively.
“I’m not sure I can wipe the memory from my mind as easily,” Davenport said.
“Pull the damn trigger, for God’s sake. It’s just an experiment.” When Davenport just stared at him with his mouth hanging open, Torin got off the chair, crossed the floor to him in about four long strides, and depressed the trigger for him. Davenport’s expression hadn’t changed, perhaps because the last one his face was frozen in was working just fine to communicate how he felt about this moment. Torin pulled up his shirt. For a second the bullet hole pierced his six-pack abs like a pull-top on one of the beer cans. Then the wound healed.
“Well, there’s a more plausible explanation for this,” Davenport said. “You’re a vampire.”
“Yeah, right,” Kendra said before shouting “urgh!” and pressing against her temples, her head now hanging suspended between her hands as she stared at the top of her desk.
“What made you suspect?” Kendra asked Torin.
“In a world where everyone is psychic I’m still a lot more psychic than most, remember? The good news is it’s not all bad news. Now that we have our feet in both worlds, I can still hear the voices from the other side loud and clear. Well, not so much loud and clear as louder and clearer than I would like. Something tells me their insights will continue to come in handy.”
“Based on what?” Kendra said, looking up from her desk hopefully, realizing innuendo when she heard it. Torin wasn’t just referring to the “dead men tell all kinds of tales” conclusion they’d come to earlier. Or the fact that it was one of their dead compatriots that gave them the idea of how to cross back over.
“Based on the fact that I’ve already received one communiqué from the other side.” He was doing something strange with his eyes. Sensing. But sensing what? “Oh my, it appears Clyde Barker has gone ahead and done whatever it is he set out to do.”
“You got that from the spirit world?”
“No, that I got with the aid of my psi sense. The help I got from the spirit world was a different kind of heads-up.”
She glared at Torin. “What did they say, exactly?” she said, noticing the curious way Torin’s eyes seemed to be searching for something neither he nor anyone else could see.
“That he’s here and so is the little girl. I can feel them.” He spun around on himself three hundred and sixty degrees, then raised his voice to the unseen intruders. “You may as well come out, wherever you are. This close to me you don’t even have to talk, I’ll just read your thoughts.”
Clyde Barker and his nine-year-old apprentice Notchka materialized in the center of the squad room in the open sea between the islands of desks. As Davenport still had his gun out he chose to stand and aim it at Barker. “I presume he’s the one that actually killed you,” Davenport said. “Making a fool out of me in the process, I might add. Now him I don’t mind shooting.” He depressed the trigger.
The nine-year-old girl held out her hand palm up and stopped the bullet half way to them. She discharged the rest of the bullets until they were all floating in the air half way between Davenport and the two of them. Then the bullets dropped to the ground and she squatted in front of them, bouncing a red rubber ball she materialized out of nowhere. “Want to play Jacks with me?” she asked Davenport.
“Sure, sweetie. Something tells me I can use a time out when I go taking the law into my own hands. Forgive me,” he said, returning his attention to Clyde, but actually talking for Torin’s and Kendra’s benefit. “These doppelgangers tend to be a little more trigger happy than the real us. A necessary precaution. Can’t have the doppelganger dying as the original may die too, if he’s too out of it to separate himself from the dream.”
Clyde took up a seat next to Torin’s desk. Kendra, feeling more than a little miffed, scooted her chair over. “For your information, I’m the lead investigator on this case,” she said.
“You’re hardly qualified to ask me the questions that need asking. For that I need a scientist.”
“Fine,” Torin said, interrupting her as she was getting ready to
lay into him. He leaned over, and drilled his eyes into Clyde.
“You’re trying to read me.”
“Yes,” Torin confessed.
“This should be interesting.”
Torin just stared at him unblinking, tilting his head one way then the other. “Oh, my God!”
“So you’re a better psychic than I imagined then.” Clyde stood up and extended his hand toward the child. “We’ll be leaving now, Notchka.”
“But I’m winning!” the little girl shouted.
“Sorry,” Clyde apologized to the three other adults in the room. “Developmental delays plague her just as surely as she’s sprinting out ahead of the rest of us. She’s chronologically nine-years-old, but inside her head she’s a mix of ages.”
“Not so different than the rest of us,” Torin said smiling affably at her.
She stood up from her game begrudgingly and took Clyde’s hand and they were gone, disappearing in the blink of an eye.
“What did you see?” Kendra asked.
He didn’t look at her. He looked at Davenport. “You might want to go over and wake up the real you. Something tells me he’s not going to want to miss out on this one.”
EIGHTEEN
Davenport shoe-leathered it over to the sofa, picked up the invisible man and shook him. When that didn’t work, he slapped him around a little. Finally, he delivered a full on blow to the gut. Everyone else in the room heard the invisible man groan. Seconds later he started to materialize. As he did so, Davenport’s doppelganger started to fade. “It’s been fun, guys,” the doppelganger said, staring back at Torin and Kendra before disappearing entirely. By then the original Davenport was back in full form, rubbing the back of his head.
“Glad the real you chose to bless us with your presence,” Kendra said.
“This better be good, that’s all I can say. And could you please keep your voice down and that searchlight out of my eyes?”
The few dim lights throughout the sea of darkness were floating atop desktops, the square incandescent lamps, not unlike those lanterns the Japanese and Hawaiians set afloat on the ocean to commemorate special occasions. Kendra and Torin exchanged grimaces. “I know we’ve evolved far beyond baser humanity,” Torin said, “but when exactly did we develop this kind of patience for our fellow man?”
“Speak for yourself.” She shifted her glare at Davenport to Torin. “Go grab some coffee, Davenport, Torin is about to get all melodramatic. Some end of all creation prophecy. I know that not because I’m psychic but because I’ve seen the look on his face enough times before.”
“Really? Excellent! I don’t need coffee for that,” Davenport said, snapping awake and looking all perky on a dime. He came to heel between them like a loyal dog waiting for one of his masters to throw him a bone.
She shook her head at Davenport. “What do you have against life as it is?”
“You’re kidding, right?” Davenport said. “We’ve had this Present Shock debate a hundred times. I thought we all agreed my coping mechanisms were even more fragile than yours, meaning I’m likely to crack that much sooner under pressure. So get on with the end of world scenario, already. Got to be an improvement over my present situation.”
“You still drive a 1950s Chevy to and from work to a wife who wears a 1950s French Maid outfit at home to watch 1950s TV?” Torin asked. Davenport was nodding his head the entire time.
Torin crossed his arms and furrowed his brow. “What was on TV in the 1950s, out of curiosity?”
“I Love Lucy,” Davenport replied. “Actually they weren’t too different than the two of you, only Ricky was the condescending one in that relationship.”
“We’re moderns, so we take turns condescending to one another,” Kendra interjected.
“Seems fair.”
“And…” Torin probed.
“Perry Mason and Gunsmoke. Most of what I know about the law and criminal justice today comes from those guys.”
“And you’re still effective as a detective?” Torin asked, realizing the inflection in his voice was rising as he got to the end of that sentence.
“The more things change…”
“Yeah, I guess there has to be some truth to that.” Torin rubbed his chin reflexively as he reflected on the matter.
“Stop stalling, Torin,” Kendra said. “The end of the world is going to seem like a tempest in a teapot compared to my wrath if you keep this up.”
“Fine, but just so we’re clear, I did try to give you a moment to collect yourself.” He sighed and his shoulders sunk in on themselves. He padded over to his desk as it had a bigger monitor than Kendra had, suitable for two people leaning over his shoulder without breathing down his neck. And he brought up images of Ley lines, along with the monoliths they connected across the globe, Stonehenge, the pyramids of Egypt, the pyramids in Mexico…
“Oh, I love this ancient aliens stuff,” Davenport said. He cleared his throat. “That is the office alter of me loves this stuff. It pays to have some additional personas if you’re going to have a coping mechanism like mine.”
“Not this New Age stuff again, Torin,” Kendra blurted. “I have enough to contend with at home with your granola-loving personality. Tired breaking my teeth on your idea of multi-grain bread.”
“No, no, a little respect, lady,” Davenport said. “The idea is that ancient civilizations couldn’t possibly have the wherewithal to build structures so mathematically precise, so architecturally grand without spacemen from Mars or where have you. And we know this because even with modern technologies we couldn’t replicate the structures. Even a doubting Thomas like you has to admit the theories have some street cred.”
“What’s more,” Torin chimed in, “the military has been able to see the Ley lines with technology that’s decades old now. Cameras that can focus on nothing but the Earth’s energy veins and meridians, and where they intersect more so than elsewhere, most notably, the Earth’s chakras, like the ones in our own body.”
“Get to it, Chris. The sooner this nonsense is over with the better.” Kendra’s face was as stern as ever.
“Well, just like the planet has these energy meridians, nadirs, and chakras, so does the universe, and so does the multiverse. With enough sophistication, they can be used as a roadmap for getting from one parallel universe to another, one parallel multiverse to another for that matter.”
Davenport was nodding with folded arms. “Yeah. Common knowledge spaceships from other worlds use them not just to navigate by, but like wormholes to get across impossible distances, land on and take off from, like airplane runways. All verified like a hundred times over, ah-ha.”
Kendra’s eyebrows tried their darndest to meet in the middle. “Verified, my ass. By nuts like you, you mean? With probably even less mind power to throw at the problem because they’re juggling even more alternate personas, each sharing a piece of a whole person’s actual brain.”
“Ouch,” Davenport said. “That sounded so bigoted against multiple personality types.”
Kendra had had enough. She turned her back on them and pounded it over to her desk on her low-high heels. She went back to sifting through more down-to-earth cases she could actually make some progress on.
Davenport and Torin exchanged glances. “Castles full of denial, buddy,” Davenport said. “I don’t know how we’re going to get past the moats, the castle walls, the archers, the buckets of hot tarry oil, and all the rest of her defenses.”
“I do.” Torin turned to Kendra, who was still refusing to look at him. “What Clyde Barker has done is used this world of ours that is so responsive to thoughts and feelings, so psychically impressionable, and turned it into a thought amplifier for the rest of the multiverse so he can influence evolution at a distance.”
She swiveled on her chair toward him with a vacant look on her face. “That’s right,” Torin said. “He’s trying to do to everyone everywhere in every time line on every planet in every universe in every multiverse what your father d
id to you. Only, they won’t be able to put a finger on their oppressor, not across these kinds of distances.”
“Nicely played,” Davenport said, leaning into him. “But she’s still not going to go for it. Too much of a thick boundary thinker. Need a thin boundary thinker to be able to absorb this, the kind of person who doesn’t think there’s much separating reality from fantasy, past, present and future, or the spirit world from this world. The kind of person who slips in and out of altered states of consciousness easily. Because the boundaries for them are a lot more permeable.”
“So how do we stop him?” Kendra said, her eyes focusing.
“Wait. What? You’re buying this?” Davenport said. “You’re actually buying this?”
“If there’s one thing I know about domineering assholes who want to run psy-ops games on people’s heads, especially the gullible and the innocent and the unwary, is if there’s a way, they’ll find it. And then they’ll use it against even the wary and the jaded and the hard-to-get-over on. And this guy is more brilliant than anyone alive, last I checked, with more scientific acumen inside his head than many corporations have under one roof. So while I may not be buying any of this New Age crap, because I don’t claim to remotely understand or believe in it, I am going to play along on the remote chance that the best psychic in the world, that we know of, who hasn’t been wrong yet, might be worth listening to.”
“Since when did you get so reasonable about being unreasonable?” Davenport said.
“I suspect spending some time on the other side has changed us both irrevocably,” Torin replied.
“Oh, that’s right, I keep forgetting I’m talking to dead man and woman walking. Shit, that’s weird. Remind me to be weirded out by it, will you? Just that my head can only hold on to so much weirdness at one time.”
“Tell me about it,” both Torin and Kendra said in sync. They smiled at one another and softened out of their defensive cross-armed poses.
Time Bandits Page 15