by Rune Skelley
Kyle saw the inside of a nondescript laboratory: white walls, glass-front cabinets, scarred black tabletops. The room lacked windows and looked old and utilitarian, like a high school chem lab. The equipment at the work stations was complex, but unfinished. Most lacked outer casings, their multi-colored wires and circuit boards exposed. Kyle was unimpressed.
The overly tall TEF scientist stood at a lab table, poking the insides of a particularly ugly machine with a voltage meter and making notes on a clipboard. His girlfriend approached, carrying a tray on which lay three barbell studs, each of a different metal.
“Where did she get those things on the tray?” Kyle asked, interested in spite of himself.
Rook dismounted in a huff and rolled to the other side of the bed.
The tracking jewelry came from the vault.
Kyle’s head filled with a swish-pan away from the nerds over to an immense door like the one at Kyle’s dad’s bank. The motion disoriented Kyle and prevented him from going after Rook. He fell back on the bed and was inundated with a tsunami of technical information about the nanotech jewelry, and how the Floating Wisdom used it to track their experimental subjects before their discovery of the wonder that was Fin.
“Stop it!” Kyle croaked. “I don’t need to know all that.”
The flow of information slowed to a trickle, leaving Kyle with a view of the vault door, overlaid with interference from the Fin Channel.
“I want every single piece of jewelry in that vault. Bring it up here now. Put it in one of the small chambers. You can do your transporter thing through metal walls, right?”
Of course. Our transportation system utilizes dimensions beyond the three recognized by humans and—
“I don’t need to know the details. Just do it.”
It is done already.
Kyle thought the spiders sounded eager. That was only natural. They assumed he had a glorious plan for the unification of the human species and were excited to aid him. In reality he had no plan at all. It was important to possess the bugged jewelry so no one else could. It was an advantage, a potential weapon no one else should have. Accomplishing this coup felt like a good day’s work and Kyle was anxious to get back to more pressing matters, namely the pleasures to be had with his female companion.
“Good work. Now, inventory the jewelry — by hand, or antenna, or whatever. Also maintain surveillance on those two, plus Fin and his wife. Got it? Report back in twelve hours.”
Eight hours is the standard interval.
“Now that I have the electronics we’re going to change that. Got it?” He tried to sound as stern as possible.
The alien presence retracted from his mind without reply.
Once again able to concentrate on his immediate surroundings, Kyle discovered Rook lying on her stomach, watching TV. He leaned over and placed a kiss on the curve of warm flesh where the underside of her ass met her thigh.
*** *** ***
The frightened looks on Rainbow’s and Marsh’s faces told Fin their news wasn’t good, but he was unprepared for the totality of the badness. “I think we’re lucky to be alive,” Marsh said. It went downhill from there. The jewelry was in the vault at the beginning of their shift, gone at the end. All of it. Security footage exonerated the scientists, barely. They were interrogated thoroughly and then fired.
Rook commiserated with the couple and thanked them as she ushered them out.
“Floating Wisdom,” Fin swore. “I wonder when they were going to tell me. Dangle it like a carrot so I’d help them on their fucked up mission.”
He fumed and stomped around the house. He called to the aliens. He kept it up until he was mentally hoarse and heard not so much as a peep.
“Why did they take it if they don’t want to talk to me?” he asked.
“I hear some idiot taught them to play hardball.”
Fin scowled.
“Since we have no intention of playing their game, we have no choice but to play our own.” She rolled her eyes to the haunted chessboard of doom.
“To play the right game, we need the right pieces,” Fin reminded her.
“We know where to get them.”
“You up to facing Kyle and Her?”
“To get Thumper back? Fuck yeah!”
***
Fin slumped in the ratty recliner, exhausted. His eyes stung and his head felt too heavy, but not in the good way brought on by certain recreational pharmaceuticals. This was a bone-weary, desperate exhaustion brought on by who-knew-how-many hours sitting in this chair staring at the damn chess table, trying move after move, variation after variation, opening gambit after mid-game finesse.
At least the trip to Donner was uneventful. They’d spent the car ride psyching themselves up for another confrontation with Kyle and the other Rook, but the place was abandoned. Unchallenged they walked in, grabbed the glass display case, and walked back out.
In the car on the way home Rook said, “Ask me again why the aliens took the jewelry.”
Fin played along. “Why did those fucking bugs steal the jewelry if they don’t want to talk to me?”
“Kyle.” Her single word reply hit him like a fist to the gut. Kyle and the aliens were in league now. To what purpose he had no idea, but it couldn’t be good.
The rest of the trip home was silent, both of them pondering doomsday scenarios. The hours since their return were spent right here, taking chess advice from a talking lava lamp.
Across the table from Fin, Rook sat on the leather sofa. Apart from her bloodshot eyes she looked alert, and Fin was determined to keep going as long as she did.
The new chessmen definitely matched their table. They were the same eerie pale green. The bishops were little men in clerical robes and mitered hats, identical to the lone bishop in their possession down to the flowing beard. The five pawns also matched their own darker green warriors. Most important they now possessed the white king. They could play a legitimate game.
After cracking her knuckles, Rook made a face at the board and moved a knight out. An unusual first move for her, made all the more unusual by the fact the knight was a picture from Julie Rome’s book.
“That shuffled things differently,” Vesuvius said.
“Differently good, or differently bad?” Rook asked.
“Differently,” Vesuvius said.
Since retrieving Shaw’s partial white army they experienced a lot more movement from the board, or at least Vesuvius did. He was eager to help, but had difficulty explaining what he saw. It was like trying to pick a lock relying on someone else’s verbal description of how the tumblers moved.
Fin advanced his opposing knight and waited for a reaction.
“Wow,” Vesuvius said, and nothing more. The lamp spoke in a monotone, making it impossible to tell if he was genuinely impressed or being sarcastic.
Rook raised her eyebrows at Fin. Maybe they were finally onto something. She moved her other picture-knight and the lamp said, “Hmm.”
Another four moves convinced them they made a wrong move somewhere because, according to Vesuvius, things were now rotating backwards.
As Rook stood to reset the pieces she said, “I just had an awful thought.”
“Hit me,” Fin said.
“What if it matters which square each individual piece starts on. Like maybe this pawn,” she waved one of the white warriors at him, “maybe he has to start on the second square from the left. If he starts on the edge, or in the third spot, or wherever, it doesn’t count.”
“Aw, fuck.”
“I think the Id is catastrophically lonely,” Vesuvius said.
Fin cocked his head and looked at the lamp. Where had that come from?
“Too fucking bad for it,” Rook said. “It can’t have our baby. Now, do you think we should mess around with specific square placements? See if ’Suvi can tell if one is better than the others?”
Fin shrugged, desperate for sleep.
Rook went on, “I wish we knew how the pieces were
arranged when the table appeared. The game was supposed to be played from that point.” She stopped talking and looked at Fin. “You look like shit, Muffin.”
He smiled feebly. “Thanks, Cookie.”
“Let’s put you to bed. Maybe I’ll stay up for a bit with Vesuvius and see if I have any luck with my latest brainstorm.”
Fin lacked the energy to argue. He flopped down on the sofa. As his eyes closed he felt Rook pulling his boots off.
*** *** ***
Under their current arrangement, the spiders had a lot of time to think.
Kyle evinced no desire to interact with them on any level. He had acclimated to their presence, as hoped. A warmer, more open climate did not result, however. Instead, he and the spiders settled into a state of brittle tolerance that would snap at any mention of uniting the mind of humanity. He was as far away now as when he’d lain comatose on Earth.
Their reports always focused on Fin and Rook, as per Kyle’s standing orders, but during surveillance a secondary player held the spiders’ attention.
It wasn’t sentiment that made Willow so interesting, although she had been the first thing they ever saw. She spun them from her own imagination while journeying in the collective mind. Her more recent feats were just as impressive, despite her evident disappointment.
That never came across in the reports.
Her recent visit to Fin’s home was related to Kyle as, “Willow visited and did some magic tricks.”
Kyle didn’t ask if the magic worked. It wasn’t Willow who was under surveillance, so it would have been extraneous detail to describe her limited success.
Nor would Kyle have any interest in understanding the ramifications.
He owned the means to tap into the fabric of the collective human unconscious. Direct access. Willow contacted the Id using only two pieces of the jewelry. Thanks to Kyle’s paranoia, the spiders now possessed a truckload. Because they continued to follow his directives, they’d witnessed how it could be used.
All because of Kyle’s leadership. All kept secret from him.
It would be premature to bring any of it up with him at this stage anyway. Willow’s performance was impressive and inspiring, but calculations showed that even with the prodigious quantity of jewelry at their disposal it would not be feasible to open a portal large enough and stable enough to be of any tactical use. Willow’s method would not scale.
If they could show him a working portal, surely Kyle would listen to them.
And they could! The key lay in constructing an emitter for a special carrier wave, adjusting the transceivers’ output — a mere firmware update — and deploying the devices in the correct formation. With the carrier wave to supply raw energy they wouldn’t need to boost the power of the individual pieces, just calibrate their resonance so the peaks of all their waves lined up. That, and configuring the array as an antenna to concentrate this augmented output rather than letting it disperse in all directions, would produce geometric signal increases.
It had to be ready for launch before Kyle could know about it. He would divert them if they let him find out too soon, dismiss their careful reasoning and detailed computations. They would need to prove it to him, to open his eyes.
The necessary tinkering was rudimentary for a mind like the spiders’.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CROSSING THE THRESHOLD
The investigation into the theft of the microtransceivers is inconclusive. There remains no sign of the devices, nor any indications of a foreign power or rival cell recently handling a large covert delivery. All potential suspects have been ruled out, including research staff on duty at the time of the disappearance.
Operation Lullaby internal communication, 4-26-2001
The bugs insisted on an audience, refusing to tell Kyle what it was about.
In the large chamber, they’d woven an opaque sheet of gauzy webbing. It hung from the main web like laundry on the line. They’d told him ‘the demonstration’ was ready and instructed him to lift one corner of this shimmery panel and reach through.
His reluctance prompted the spiders to think about Fin, and Kyle saw they believed Fin would go along with it, and they admired that. His face flushed with anger, and he felt stupid for being baited so easily by implied jeers of ‘chicken!’
Kyle poked his head through an open space in the webbing to look at the underside. No foreign objects planted for his chance discovery. No clever pockets worked into the material. In the spiders’ mind he read no deception.
He withdrew his head and reached under the gauze, immediately grasping a small hard object. When he opened his fist he saw a gray-green clump of old coins welded together by corrosion. It faded after a few seconds.
“What was that?”
The spiders were almost too excited to answer, their giddiness trying his patience.
The importance lies not in the item itself, but in how it came to you. You reached into the Collective Id, by way of the portal we generated for you.
This was like the table where he got Rook. The spiders built him one for some reason.
“Why do you think this is useful to me?”
This is a small demonstration! At full scale, this device will offer the power to invade the Collective Id, the chance to seize control.
Kyle blinked. “Go on.”
The power lies in the jewelry you so foresightedly directed us to acquire. We built new hardware which enables the jewelry to function as a portal. A portal into the Collective Id, the source of the miraculous inner workings of the jewelry, the place where we were born.
Kyle made himself stop rolling his eyes and listen. At least until he knew why the bugs thought he would care.
Woven into this web, arrayed in careful geometry, are 169 pieces of jewelry. The aggregate result is a stable, persistent portal.
Kyle moved behind the sheet and floated close to inspect the underlying web structure. The intricate design held a shiny silver hoop or barbell at every junction.
He considered the many dozens of cases of the stuff stowed in a nearby chamber.
“That’s going to be a big web.”
In the final design there will be no web. Such a deployment would be static, whereas real-time adjustments are needed for full optimization. Additionally, by meshing the transceiver impulses with the natural electrochemical signals of the central nervous system there is a boost in—
“How will it be rigged, if not in a web?” Kyle cut in, his impatience returning.
They showed him. The jewelry would be installed in 10,201 human subjects, each transported to particular coordinates so the mob’s overall arrangement would form the array. The people could even be puppeted to fine tune the geometry and perform the necessary real-time adjustments.
We will initiate the carrier wave and position the devices. When the configuration is perfect, this wave will be relayed and amplified throughout the array, opening a glorious doorway into the Collective Id. It is told in the Divided Man Prophecy that you can enter and assume control. We will achieve our Great Work at last.
Kyle had assumed this obsession of theirs was purely theoretical, that however much they talked it wasn’t something they’d ever be able to actually do. He’d been wrong. Bluffing wasn’t their style, and it was unwise to bet against them on anything technical.
“You guys can really do this, can’t you?”
Yes.
Well, that settled it. Kyle shrugged. He had Rook. Let the bugs do whatever they wanted with everyone else.
We can create the portal, but the next task is beyond us. It has to be someone special, per the prophecy.
Kyle scowled. “You’re saying it has to be me?”
It has to be a Tanner.
Kyle’s expression shifted to a sneer. They didn’t have the balls to break the agreement, so they couldn’t get Fin involved. His face clouded as he thought about potential loopholes. They wouldn’t have to bring Fin here, hell they wouldn’t even have to talk to him. Th
ey might set it all in motion and shanghai the bastard without violating the rules.
Shit. There was no way for it to play out that didn’t suck. Fin had to stay out of it, period.
It had been perfect when he could blow them off, knowing it would never amount to anything. Now, he couldn’t keep stringing them along.
It was unjust that these aliens were about to get everything they wanted by depriving Kyle of the only thing he wanted. He wished them dead, but then his floating love grotto would become a tomb for Rook as well. Dammit, they had him trapped!
You are troubled.
Wait! What trap? They were talking about making a magic doorway and holding it open for him. The Id wasn’t such a bad place. He lived there for a long time. Rook also, in a way. This time they would be there together, physically. Very physically. They would never come back. All he had to do was say yes.
“No, not troubled. Impressed. I suppose you’ll want Rook to do the piercings?”
When the spiders finished heaping thanks upon him, he went to tell Rook about the project. She was delighted at the idea of piercing unwilling strangers and watching them tromp around in formation like zombies.
“It’ll be marching band mind control,” she chuckled. “I’ll need some equipment, and an assload of latex gloves.”
*** *** ***
The initial giddy luster of surreptitiously puncturing hordes of strangers had worn off long ago, the illicit thrill replaced by grinding monotony and cramping, sweaty hands.
“I’ll have to open a new box soon, babe,” Kyle said. “Do you want barbells or more hoops?”
Rook tilted her head far to the right, stretching her neck and shoulders as she pondered her answer. “Barbells.”
One of the smaller spiders scuttled forward with her next customer, an unconscious middle-aged man in green and gray Buck U sweats. Rook looked disdainfully at his receding hairline and flabby physique.
“Maybe I should pierce his love handles.”
Kyle snorted. “Stick to ears.”
Rook picked up the last hoop from the carton. There were 48 pieces per box and this was the 102nd box, she thought, so that made… a whole fucking lot of earlobes.