As for Silver Surfer, his hoverboard control would have been provided by the nanite hive mind in the board itself, and the numberless nanites serving as miniature rockets, using chemical explosives whose precise discharge would have been in hive’s hands. It was just a matter of tanking up the board at the local airport, floating about the sector somewhere, catering to hoverboard enthusiasts.
“What can you tell me about the Dark Matter Man, gentlemen?” Victor asked as Super Man and Silver Surfer joined the huddle; Victor, parked for now on a point along the arc of his pure energy mandala bridge, his mind pinching space-time just so to create the well-controlled singularity.
“No one has heard from Dracus in days,” Aerogel Boy said. His girlfriend had joined him, slipping in under his arm, before he could finish making the pronouncement. She was fashioned from the same aerogel nano-engineering technique. He resisted the urge to ask how the inflatable-doll sex was treating them. God, he hated being nice; it was so debasing.
Dracus was the master wizard of this district. And this being the Transhumanist sector, that meant he had the biggest mind of the bunch. Victor knew of him only by reputation. He had a DNA computer for a brain—not the one he was born with—the kind that could do countless operations at once in parallel, an actual DNA computer. DNA computers excelled at divided thinking, even if they were less good at other things. Victor didn’t take that as a particularly good omen.
If Dracus had become possessed by the Dark Matter Man, it could mean the Dark Matter Man was contemplating a simultaneous assault on all the districts. Perhaps so he could keep all the master wizards busy as he got himself into even more trouble without anyone with enough mind power left to do much about it. It’s how Victor would have played it—if he had a DNA computer for a brain—and honestly, no one was a better mastermind at Machiavellian schemes than Victor, which is what worried him; his chances of being right were a lot higher than they were of being wrong.
“No doubt you’re thinking what we’re thinking,” Superman said.
“Yes, I am,” Victor replied. Superman sounded like a bit of a namby-pamby coward, afraid to go where even heroes feared to tread, in that getup. They all did, considering not one of them could be bothered to pay Dracus a visit, to find out what was really going on with him. Victor couldn’t blame them; if anyone stood a chance against Dark Matter Man, it was Victor. “What else can you tell me about Dracus, guys, before the Dark Matter Man possessed him?”
“Dracus was looking for synergies in the various sciences, obvious convergence points not yet glimpsable by others,” Aerogel girl replied. “Dracus is not the only specialist in that area. I myself am one of many, if you need a consult.”
Victor nodded, his eyes somewhat off-target, considering his mind was already running with possibilities. Christ, that’s all I need; to have to deal with a convergence-tech-wizard on top of everything else. Dean C. Moore had written about them in his Age of Abundance series, where he’d referred to them glibly as The Time Weavers. That was owing to their ability to collapse the timeline in unexpected places by bringing together various technologies no one should have been able to figure out how to combine for decades to come. Victor couldn’t afford to get lost down that rabbit hole right now, wondering about the possibilities.
His eyes sharpened as he came back into the moment. “Thank you all for your assistance. I’ll take it from here.”
“Hey, maybe’s now a good time to consider sidekicks,” Silver Surfer said.
“We know you like to go things solo, but…” Aerogel boy piped up, echoing the sentiment.
“Start a fan page for me, will you? And make sure everyone posts their curriculum vitae. I’ll let the winners know. Make sure anyone fool enough to put their names on that list knows what they’re in for. I’m sure you have no shortage of Dark Matter experts who can speculate on the kind of pain coming their way, and who might have the right stuff to stand up to it. I’ll be sure to add in whatever they left out in their dire warnings.”
“You can count on us,” Iron Man said. Victor noted that he kept the comment vague, and no one was looking to un-vague it. He could have meant Victor could count on them to get the website up, post the danger signs ahead, and not add their names to that list. Just as well. He didn’t need a bunch of gung-ho fools signing on. Sidekicks were Soren’s bag; Victor would just as likely lose his temper when one of them let him down and do something nearly as evil as whatever the Dark Matter Man had in store for the rest of them.
Victor darted off to Dracus’s penthouse flat. A few of the late-year-teens and early-twenty-somethings he’d just been chatting with got excited enough pondering Dracus and what the master wizard was capable of for the energy spike to telecast everything they knew about the master magician into Victor’s head. Victor’s telepathy, such as it was, depended on that level of excitement; otherwise he couldn’t register the mandala energy imprints against all the background noise his mind was set up to filter out most days, so he wasn’t distracted by the innocuous.
One thing that caught Victor by surprise: Dracus was a woman.
Female scientists had caught up to male scientists in numbers, especially here in the Transhumanist sector, where the hetero couples could barely stand to mate with anyone whose mind wasn’t as uber-enhanced as theirs. But Dracus—well, the name was hardly unisex in nature. But the implications, for Victor’s purposes, were even scarier.
Women usually didn’t kill by direct methods. Direct methods Victor could relate to; it would make it so much easier for him if his opponent thought like he did. But with a female adversary… and their penchant for sly methods, poisons, and the like, where they could be a million miles away at the moment death rolled into town in the form of an aerosolized gas, or a tainted water supply, or…. That was going to be so much harder to counter.
And if there was someone who could counter his Machiavellian schemes, it would be a woman, well used to getting around men’s inherent fools-charge-in natures, looking for the shortest point between two ends, namely direct confrontation.
Victor liked his odds less and less the closer he got to Dracus’s city within a city—the hotel Atlantis—where the best tech wizards were holed up; they alone could afford the exclusive digs. The Atlantis was built like a spaceship; with all needs met without having to ever leave the building—hence the city within a city moniker.
Dracus was dancing in the nude across a spacious hardwood dance floor, visible through the window wall overlooking the city—as if she’d spent her life in the ballet. She was shaved up to and including her crotch, and her tits were every bit as disciplined as the rest of her—not too big so as to get in the way of her dancing but tight and well-formed—a gymnast’s breasts, petite and lovely.
Victor hovered beyond the window, entranced by the dancing, and what appeared to be a kind of moving meditation for her. The dancing was beyond professional grade—some of those moves only a transhuman could pull off. The horror of what he was watching struck him not too long after the beauty of it did.
Her DNA brain wasn’t located just in her head—but in every cell of her body. The various regions dedicated to various kinds of multi-processing endeavors, in keeping with their specialties. Just like the brain had zones demarking specialized activity.
But the movement, the dance, facilitated communication between all regions—amping up her parallel processing abilities.
She wasn’t dancing to escape the world, or to become so centered as to access nirvana; she was dancing to hasten her command and control of this world. Victor doubted anyone else would have made the connection between the beauty and the beastliness—but she was on his planet now; such fusions were how he made his way in the world. Only, with a glance, it was clear he’d been outclassed.
With what he knew about how dark matter worked—well beyond what any physicist on Earth had put together—the kind of sentience that it was possible to evolve in a dark matter zone—and what he knew of DNA brains—bu
ilt as they were on fractal geometries, which were a subset of his mandala magic—clearly he had both the best leg up on her possible, and was at the same time in the best position to know just how outmatched and outplayed he was.
Still, fools rush in, do they not?
He didn’t think he had any choice this time but to use himself as cannon fodder. His usual style involved throwing lesser wizards at the problem, seeing what truths revealed themselves from others’ mistakes; thus learning from his enemy without putting himself in harm’s way. But as sensible as that approach remained, especially without him knowing just what wizards were out there capable of taking her on—the most powerful ones kept themselves hidden, and for good reason—Victor just didn’t feel he had the time. Not with a DNA brain working full tilt to figure out how to get around every sector’s best-in-class wizard.
He sailed through the window wall, expecting it to shatter on impact, so he could impress her with restoring it. But it opened like the iris of a camera to admit him—the nanites in the smart-glass having no trouble accommodating the intrusion, and responding to her directive to permit entry. She would have had to override its primary security protocols—write the new coding—on the fly; which she’d done, all without breaking from her dancing.
“The dance is quite lovely,” he said, his head tilting this way and that in keeping with her toying with gravity nearly as expertly as he did. “But we both know the horrors lurking behind your every move.”
She smiled vaguely at him as she put both feet on the ground and rapidly did those tight dancers turns, with her head whipping about without ever losing the lock on his eyes, using him as a point of focus, as she moved closer.
She stopped spinning only when her close-cut hair was close enough to brush him in the face, and then she planted a kiss on his lips, held the vague smile and glance for another beat, before returning to her dancing.
The nanites in her saliva….
They were messing with his sacred geometries. Overwriting them and cutting off his connection with the blueprints upon which this and all parallel universes were based; that link had never been severed, not once in all his life; he’d been born feeling that connection. He could feel the lines being severed not just to the nanites that maintained their mandala configurations floating throughout his body, but he could feel the energy body itself that anchored him to this physical plane losing coherence.
He dropped like a fresh cut of meat.
Without breaking from the dance, she delivered a kick, and out the window he flew—which opened yet again for him, as she showed him the door in the opening eye of the iris.
He was falling toward the city street below. How many stories down he could no longer tell; his connection to the most basic elements of space-time was lost.
NINE
Victor’s freefall was interrupted by Superman, who caught him in both arms, flew him up, up, and away. “Where to, Victor?”
Victor wanted to rip his tonsils out for making him look this ridiculous. He felt like he was caught up in a gay version of Superman. Let’s hope he got well before they thought to serialize this take on the old classic, too. “Get me to my penthouse,” he instructed.
Superman didn’t seem to need any more cuing; Thank God for small mercies. The less interaction he had with this fool, the easier it would be to flush this out of his mind as nothing more than a psychotic break.
Moments later, they were hovering just beyond the roof of the Excelsior. Victor’s penthouse apartment-the real one, not the one he rented to keep up public appearances—warded by his magic, remained invisible. There just appeared to be the flat roof beyond. Victor held out his hand, but nothing happened. “Unbelievable,” he muttered, as his arm dropped.
Seconds later the apartment came into focus. It was Ramon, his new protégé. Somehow the clod had managed to get past his security measures to gain access to the flat, and undo the concealment magic and figure out enough to drop the window wall, as well, so Superman could fly Victor in.
“Ah, just lay him on the floor,” Ramon said. “This place doesn’t exactly have a bed.”
“Just call me if you need me,” Superman said. Before he flew off, he touched Ramon. Victor could tell he was implanting him with the nanites that would key his voice to Superman’s sensitive hearing so it would function like it did in the movies. All Ramon would have to do thereafter was give out a shout.
“Thanks,” Ramon said, speaking nervously and sounding unsure of himself, of what to do or say, something Victor was coming to realize was his baseline. Or maybe it was honesty and straightforwardness that he struggled with; maybe his impish smile underscored less roguish playfulness and more sheer deviousness.
Superman flew off, and Ramon restored the window walls with a gesture and words of power, which he seemed to need to help him focus the mandala magic. Crude, but effective, and Victor was beyond condescending; or at least he’d lost the right to, even if he couldn’t exactly curb those appetites.
“Hold on,” Ramon said. He knelt down, touching various shapes within the larger geometries formed by different colored hardwoods in the floor, and mumbling again. To Victor’s surprise, he managed to trigger the anti-gravity effect to procure the equivalent of an air bed, floating him off the floor. The shape-shifting geometries on the floor continued shapeshifting and beaming fresh patterns of light and energy at Victor. The teen had also managed to get the anti-gravity bed’s healing properties to initiate. Victor might have a chance now.
This Ramon character was no end of surprises. It would take an A-grade mandala magician to figure out as much as he had in the time he had; to guess at some of the hidden treasures designed into the apartment itself—ones Victor himself had long since forgotten. And unless Victor missed his guess, Ramon was working off the cuff regarding the anti-gravity bed and its healing properties. He was probably just guessing that Victor would have designed the place with them, and then, on-the-fly, figuring out how such devices might be triggered manually, even if he couldn’t yet do it with a thought.
The kid had game. He would never be in Victor’s league, but he was worth keeping around for days like today. In all likelihood, Victor’s toxic nature would poison the relationship soon enough. No one could be that eager to learn mandala magic from a master magician to be willing to incur the kinds of abuse Victor was likely to dish out without even being conscious of it.
Victor was thinking he was feeling slightly better already on the anti-gravity bed; even as he slipped into unconsciousness.
TEN
Victor stirred. Consciousness had returned, but it was more like looking out on early morning fog. He sat up and put his legs over the edge of the anti-gravity bed, the complex geometric pattern supporting him as if a magic carpet; or, as if one of those round revolving hotel beds in some lover’s fantasy role play vacation getaway hostelry.
“How long have I been out?” he barked at his apprentice, who was fiddling with an amulet taken from the many displayed on pedestals in Victor’s suite; the entire penthouse was little more than a showcase gallery for Victor’s archeological finds.
“Days.”
“How far have you gotten with that amulet in your hand?” Victor inquired, jumping off the bed.
“Nowhere. Absolutely nowhere.”
“God, you’re hopeless.”
“Hey, if it wasn’t for all the stuff I did figure out, you’d be dead already, you unappreciative shit.”
Victor grunted. “Surely, Priestly had to tell you just what kind of asshole I am. I wouldn’t put up with me. No reason you should.” He trailed the shortest path possible to his wet bar and poured himself a drink, then eyed the teen with his face buried in the amulet, and corked the bottle. After twisting the cap tight he threw the flask at him.
“Hey, watch it!” Ramon squawked, dropping the pendant to catch the bottle.
“The brew is infused with my mandala magic. Maybe it’ll make you a tad less retarded, even if it won’t turn a s
ow’s ear into a fine purse exactly.”
“Thanks, asshole.” He downed the bottle in one swig as Victor just shook his head. Victor extended his hand to call the bottle back to him. It levitated toward him and he set it down on the counter. “You’ll kill yourself taking that much at once, rob me of the pleasure of tongue lashing you to death. I should warn you, being in the presence of mediocrity isn’t exactly the trigger I need to be on my best behavior.”
“I had a job as a lion tamer once. I’ll tame you yet.”
Victor smiled despite himself. The mandala bridge started forming at his feet, and the window wall morphed, disappearing like a mirage no longer hitting the sun at the right angle.
“Where are you headed?” Ramon asked, as if Victor’s departure was just the first of many such betrayals he’d long braced himself for.
“To visit a real friend, not this pathetic wannabe creature before me playacting at being a friend.”
Ramon smiled. “We both know you don’t have any real friends. Just as well, I’m growing weary pretending to like you. Solving this mandala is a comparatively easy affair.”
Victor smiled back impertinently, mumbled, “I must have missed the pretending to like me part.” He shot off on his arc across the morning sky, as if skating across an actual rainbow.
Reviled Page 9