Reawakened

by Dean C. Moore

  “I suspect if CSA agents in her weight class can’t make headway with the likes of the Fenquin queen—and there are more out there like her—that the person yanking our chain may indeed be playing the long con—to procure the kinds of cosmic wizards that can go after the likes of the Fenquin queen.”

  “That’s a leap and a half,” Lar said, sidestepping around Soren and tripping over his foot. Soren extended his arm to keep him from landing on his face. “Thanks,” he said, managing to make it the rest of the way to his desk without killing himself.

  “Why such a leap?”

  “Surely it makes more sense to start with what cosmic wizards you have to begin with, and groom them. It would be a far easier project to bring them up to speed.”

  “Unless their minds are a bit too fixed about what a cosmic wizard is and what the rules of the game are. Unless the demand is for fresh blood and fresh thinking. And if you’ve graduated all your likely candidates and haven’t gotten anywhere, well, then, the long shots like us start to look more promising, isn’t that so?”

  Lar made a nasal sound, trying to clear his sinuses and his literally allergic reaction to the idea. Finished blowing into his nose, he said, “I think you’re re-reaching.” A sneeze quickly followed.

  “I suppose I am. I guess we just won’t know until we’ve played the game for a while longer where any of this is headed.”

  Lar buried his face in the tome he’d pulled off the shelf, pretending to be too distracted to deal with Soren right now. Soren figured he needed more sweet-talking. “We’re contemplating some really weird magic here that’ll put the cabbalistic spirit science to shame. Maybe it too will be an amalgam of magic and science, or maybe not. But whatever it is, it’ll have to defy the way the cosmos is put together. It’ll be another form of dark magic, surely, like the cabbalistic magic.”

  “Yes, the cosmos wants us to reunite with the oversoul, ultimately, but it wants us to do so organically, over the course of so many lifetimes. It’s the joining of yin and yang that we’re talking about. The divine spirit or God of being, the yin aspect, seeks to reunite with the yang aspect, or the god of becoming, which is nothing other than all physical creation, that includes us; the part that isn’t constant, but that evolves. But to force this union would mean that all of creation would implode as quickly as it was created at the moment of the last big bang—to borrow a concept from cosmological physics—which takes away from the whole point of evolution. What you’re suggesting is an abomination.”

  “So, Lar, the generalist and intellectual, whose mind is a hub for all forms of magic, even if he can’t remember them all, agrees with me.”

  Lar fluffed up at the ego-aggrandizement. It was less megalomania in his case as it was with Victor, and more low self-esteem that needed countering to remind him of his real raison d’etre, which was to help souls like Soren out of binds like this.

  After a protracted sigh, Lar said, “Fine, I’ll help you find this weird magic you’re looking for. Just remember the last time I tried to help you, your response was to try and kill me.”

  “A moment of weakness I’m sure shan’t ever be repeated.”

  “Famous last words.” He slammed his book shut. “You realize this talent for overreaching that is rivaled only by Victor—no wonder you two are so inseparable—could kill us all. The reason God doesn’t try to stuff the entirety of that much transcendental consciousness into physical form at one time is that we would have no choice but to explode in another big bang—like trying to send too much electricity through a lightbulb.”

  “And yet, with the weird science you will whip up for me… Wait.” The light bulb was going on in Soren’s head just as Lar was warning of blowing a fuse.

  “Maybe that big bang is what we’re looking for,” Lar said, arriving at the same conclusion as Soren at the same time. “What you’re suggesting… driving the Fenquin queen out will kill us all.”

  “How many times have each of us come back from the dead, either figuratively or literally? Rebirthing rituals are a thing with Dr. Frankenstein and his monsters. But I suspect we live in a time now when we must all make rebirthing rituals a thing. If we can’t be born again from day to day, to tackle the world with fresh new outlooks, we just can’t stay in the competition. Isn’t that so Lar, or should I say, Cypher, or should I say Captain Klutz?”

  Lar smiled. “Yes, well, the rebirthing theme that’s been stalking us on this case… Just remember, it requires someone to perform the magic. And with all of us dead and on the other side, who will carry out the ritual?”

  “One bridge to cross at a time, Lar.”

  Lar stood from the desk and started perusing his shelves. He knew, of course, that he couldn’t find the book in question; he had no idea what he was looking for; he needed Captain Klutz to bungle upon it, but he didn’t exactly know how to summon Captain Klutz. He hadn’t exactly identified the trigger.

  Soren had his own problems. He was still frightfully unclear about how all these different magics were going to come together to rid them of the Fenquin queen, when none of them by themselves would be enough. He didn’t even know if he had all the right ingredients for the recipe, far less in what order the items should be stirred into the pot, and how long each should be allowed to simmer for the tastes to blend just so. And, as anyone cooking from a recipe will tell you, the recipe alone can’t work the magic. Something intangible in the cook himself must play a part for it all to work.

  The roadmap for their success in hand; it was starting to look like the map at the beginning of the old time TV series Bonanza—burning from the inside out the instant it was laid bare.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Lar had piles of books rising about him on his desk and on the floor immediately adjacent. Those were the ones he’d already worked his way through and, so far, nothing. He kept throwing a wary eye at Soren who had collapsed on the floor, his back against one of the shelves, fast asleep.

  What was it like for such a tormented creature to dream? Lar should have felt safer with Soren’s guard down, but it was just the opposite.

  When his eyes left the page Lar was scanning for the umpteenth time to go to Soren, Lar noticed the nanite hive that customarily hung out on one side of his face was no longer there. A product of the dreaming? A consequence of some rewiring going on in his brain during dream state? Or…

  Lar did a quick survey of the room and yelped. The nanite hive, moving like a crab spanning nearly two feet from end to end and made up of nothing but baby crabs crawling over one another—the way those army ants made bridges out of their own bodies—was feeling its way around Lar’s bookshelves. More to the point, it was inching toward Lar!

  Lar jumped up from his desk and grabbed the fire extinguisher. By the grace of Techa—goddess of all technological innovation, including the creepy kind—he made it to the crab to spray it good before it got much further. The crab did seem dazed and disoriented after getting doused. But this drama wasn’t over yet. More of the little bastards were crawling out from under Soren’s robe. Why was he always getting caught up in these bad sci-fi movies from the 1950s? What was this latest one, Attack of the Killer Crab Bots from Dimension-X!

  With no time to waste, he let Soren have it before another one of those things could get clear of him. The fire extinguisher, thanks to Lar’s finger dexterity—the one set of muscles in his body in shape for a situation like this—being no newcomer to hitting the panic button—turned Soren into a snowman in no time.

  To Lar’s dismay, the snowman sprouted holes just where Soren’s nostrils should be. Worse, the crabs were still crawling out of the snow man. And now they were headed for him.

  Lar’s eyes went to the long-handled axe hanging on the wall, right next to where the fire extinguisher had been hanging. “Lar, what were you thinking, grabbing the spray can when you had that thing?”

  He bolted toward the axe along the flat, unencumbered cement floor that Lar had had the foresight to make trip-proof
by keeping clear of all obstacles. He would not be undone by poor planning!

  Lar grabbed the axe, found his way to the nearest crab, and started swinging. The crab cleaved in two. Take that, you black devil!

  The crab quickly reformed, so he took another thwack at it. This time it grabbed hold of the axe and yanked it out of Lar’s hands. Now it was coming at Lar with the axe.

  “For the record, this isn’t just a bad nightmare I’m caught up in, it’s a cheesy one. And I protest vehemently!”

  The crab mustn’t have taken kindly to the rebuke, as it was now not just coming at Lar, it was swinging that axe at him and just missed cleaving him in two thanks to Lar’s sudden ability to run backwards. He was rather proud of himself under pressure, being as most days he couldn’t even run forward without doing himself serious harm.

  And then he thwacked his head hard against one of the bookshelves against the wall. The lights were dimming fast.

  When he regained consciousness he found he was buried under a pile of books. The peep hole he could see out of was vanishingly small—but big enough to spy the crab bots crawling up the mound of books to get at him. Finally the one was at his face, pulling off the book that would clear the passage to his eyeballs. Anything but the eyes!

  He lurched upward from under the rubble, throwing the books off and grabbing the book from the crab. The thing wouldn’t let go and Lar was too busy screaming and reacting reflexively, trying to whip the thing off by hurling the book without really hurling it, hoping physics would do the rest.

  And then the crab jumped off. And all the other ones retreated. Why?

  He glanced over at Soren and he was standing, wiping the white foam off him. “Lar? What the hell?”

  “I’ll kindly ask you not to attack me in your sleep! I know we’ve had our differences in the past, but siccing dream warriors at me is no way to settle things!”

  Soren ignored him, more focused on the book in Lar’s hands. Soren padded over and ripped it free of Lar’s grip, opened it. Flipped through the contents, glancing mostly at the pictures. “You found it!”

  “I… I what?” Lar grabbed the book back, did a quick survey of its contents.

  “No nanites.” Lar couldn’t believe it. “I thought when you were in that tank of yours, astral traveling, or outright time traveling, it was to resolve some nanotech upgrade issue that had you stymied.”

  “That’s just speculation on my part, Lar. I really couldn’t tell you how that tank works exactly, and what part of my unconscious is engaging with it, and for what reasons.”

  Lar continued to study the tome. But from the way his facial muscles were squirming over one another, the subtle changes in where he stored tension in his face, it was clear he had morphed into Cypher. Seeing the transition, Soren though it was like watching one of the Barrymores from the films of the 1930s getting into character—without the aid of makeup. Those were the days, when Soren’s best escape into weirdness was an old movie!

  Cypher turned to the back of the book. “There’s a chip here, like many of your other books, suggesting the contents of the book was downloaded from it. And like many of the other chips—its design looks futuristic relative to our own technology—even for the Transhumanist sector. And yet…” Lar went back to the pictures in the book. “These images have nothing to do with futuristic tech.”

  Soren studied the pictures alongside him, staring over his shoulder. “Could an AI have been tasked with procuring magic?” Soren asked. “Perhaps just to see if there was such a thing as magic—anywhere but on the pages of a fantasy novel?”

  Cypher gazed up from the book at him. “Yes, yes, of course. That’s exactly what it is.”

  “How can you know?” But by the time the words had left Soren’s lips, Cypher had morphed yet again—into Captain Klutz.

  The real clue, even more than the rearranged facial muscles was the way he’d jumped back—in one superhero leap—to plant his butt on his desk, halfway across the basement floor. He, of course, landed just hard enough to break the desk, in true Captain Klutz fashion. He glanced around at the splintered mess of wood he’d made. “Ah, sorry about that. I think I’ll leave you guys alone now that my superpowers have been exhausted pointing the way to truth, justice, and the American way for you.” Embarrassed, Captain Klutz fled, and Cypher returned, making a face.

  “Why are there splinters up my ass?” Cypher glanced down at the mess beneath him. “Oh, Captain Klutz. Should have known.” He stood up and paced as he focused that mega-mind on the task of puzzling out the book.

  Stepping closer to the disaster scene, Soren smiled. The splintered mess on the floor looked suspiciously like an old child’s game of Pick-Up-Sticks—based on far more ancient divining magic, akin to the reading of tea leaves or runes. No doubt, Captain Klutz, with his epic fuck ups, was trying to reassure all the parties in the room that they were on the right track.

  “I’ve got some ideas on where to start on this,” Cypher said, “but we’ll need Victor’s team and access to those supersentient AIs that only exist in the Transhumanist district to make headway with deciphering this in any reasonable timeframe.”

  Before he finished the sentence, Soren had a portal opened, mumbling words of power as he extended his arm, using his palm to project the portal as if it were in fact the light of a slide projector. Unlike Victor who could open portals with a thought, Soren still needed to utilize his cabbalistic magic—and that meant using the words of power associated with it.

  Victor looked up from his own pacing and fretting. His arms seemed permanently crossed about him these days, defensively, and as if sealing off his safe space from violent assault against any more unwanted insights. He dropped his guard long enough to drag Cypher through the portal before he had time to look up from the tome in his hands to recognize what was going on.

  Cypher glanced back to confirm that Soren had made it through the portal and that it had closed behind him, suddenly seeing him, ironically, as his protector.

  Victor yanked the book out of Cypher’s hands and handed it over to his four team members, Ry, An, Aeros, and Airy, all chip-, nano-, and gene-enhanced. They stuck the book in a computer scanner that flipped through it like a magician shuffling a deck of cards, loading all the images and text into their suepercomputers.

  Airy had yanked the chip out of the back of the book, seeing what she could do with it using her specialty in archeological studies. Aeros and Airy were already analyzing the chip with clouds of nanites, emitted from Aeros’s surface, and biochemical scrubbers, emitted from Airy’s aerogel body, with the idea of peeling back the tarnish to get to the essential nature of the chip. They were both looking for a way inside and a way to interact with it.

  Ry was trying to get the artificial intelligences—scads of them—sharing the lab with them to gain access to the chip by other means—essentially trying to open communications lines in all known languages via all known communications channels. The AIs were also synthesizing new languages on the fly. Even more impressively, they were inventing new communications’ channels, opening new bandwidths of EMF spectrum—also in an attempt to make contact with the future.

  The computer printers were hemorrhaging the latest innovations that could facilitate the transmission of the new EMF frequencies.

  Much of the printed output was also meant to bolster the fast-tracking of new sciences being rolled out to get a better grip on the paranormal. With the new devices the computer printers were generating, the scientists in the lab could better study dimensions of the universe they would be otherwise blind to, testing their hypotheses that it was now possible to generate from within the new sciences.

  For the AIs to be this worked up, they must have been plenty frustrated by that chip. By the DEFCON bands against the wall, rising from DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 1 in short order, the number of group minds being recruited across the Transhumanist district was expanding rapidly. The AIs were determined to throw as much mind power at this chip as they n
eeded to crack it. Not Victor, or any of his team, made any effort to quell the AIs’ determination to loop in whatever advanced sentiences they felt necessary for the task. It was Cypher’s guess that they didn’t much care about secrecy at this point; no one would understand what was going on anyway, not really, not on any deep level, apart from the supersentiences.

  ***

  “I feel like we’ve been down this road before,” Victor said, crossing his arms again. Soren figured the gesture had to do with Victor’s guessing about the nature of what was going on and not liking that the beast and Soren were both about to gain access to yet another form of magic that was beyond Victor—meaning one more sign of loss of control and Victor’s diminishing omnipotence in all things.

  “I tasked Captain Klutz with finding us some dark magic that could get around the natural order of things—in this case, the soul’s evolutionary path to reunite with the oversoul over billions and billions of lifetimes. That’s how long it takes to make a Buddha, or so I’m told.”

  Victor sighed, uncrossed his arms. Soren could swear he had shrunk a superhero-size; his flexible body armor showing a somewhat less pumped version of Victor beneath the garment. He was calming down. Why? Victor’s eyes went to the big screen monitors showing the symbols from the yet-to-be-deciphered alien language conveying the nature of the magic. Possibly it was alien—even that much wasn’t sure yet.

  “You think an AGI—Artificial General Intelligence—was used to formulate this magic?” Victor asked.

  Soren grunted. “As only an AGI could.”

  “Assuming there’s anything to your idea, what makes you think you’ll get your mind around these symbols. Might be more of a tool for the Fenquin queen than for you.”

  “The beast is confident he can work with any dark magic.”

  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.”