by J. Thorn
I shook my head. “I’m not slicing through innards and intestines trying to find the chip. He’s going to give it to me in a different way.”
“How? You’ll ask him nicely?”
“Laxatives.”
McGlade shook his head. “You’re a real piece of work, Talon.”
I picked up the fallen can of cat food, then pushed five laxative pills into the mush. Now it was just a matter of opening the cage.
“Okay, McGlade, I’ll open the door; you put the food inside.”
“Fuck you. Keep the Monet.”
To say the animal seemed extremely agitated would be putting it mildly. It looked angry enough to eat a mountain lion.
“Come on. I can’t do this alone.”
“Did you join a dissy monastery this morning and take a vow of stupid? There is no way I’m getting anywhere near that thing.”
I thought about Chomsky’s atomizer, still on my roof. That would mellow him out. Maybe I could sneak over, grab it, bring it back, atomize some marijuana…
“Fuck it,” McGlade said.
He shot the raccoon with his Taser. A bolt of Tesla lightning zapped the little guy right between the eyes, knocking him over.
“Dammit, McGlade!”
“Had to be done. You can send me the medal.”
The animal had keeled over onto its back, all four legs sticking straight up. But it still appeared to be breathing. Without hesitation I opened the cage and shoved all five pills down its throat, managing to lock him back up just as he was reviving.
“My work here is done.” McGlade folded his arms. “Where are the books?”
“The Magnum first. And the living skin.”
He handed them over. “I’ve only got those six bullets. No idea if they work or not. Now the books.”
I gave him Aunt Zelda’s address and said, “They’re yours. But you might want to wait a few days to pick them up.”
“Why?”
“Because the man I’m chasing has threatened to destroy Chicago in less than two hours.”
“I hate you, Talon. I really—”
The raccoon squealed, spinning around and lifting its bushy tail. He ejected an impressive fountain of animal waste, soaking McGlade’s pants. I’d seen less force come from fire hoses.
Ignoring McGlade’s string of invectives, I toed through the mess and found my chip. I brought it over to Chomsky’s sprinkler, rinsing it off. Then I went into the house.
In Chomsky’s bathroom, I found a bottle of hydrogen peroxide under the sink. I poured a liberal dose on my arm, and on the chip. Then I set the chip on a clean towel and unsheathed my Nife.
Removing the chip had been easy—a quick gouge in my arm fueled by panic and adrenaline. To put it back in, I’d have to fillet my skin and muscle down to the nerves, and I wasn’t looking forward to the experience. Chomsky had a decent assortment of painkillers in his medicine cabinet, but I didn’t want to take anything that might dull my senses.
Making a fist, I held my forearm over the sink. Gripping the Nife in my bad hand, I waited for the shakes to stop. They wouldn’t.
I’d just have to try my best.
I placed the flat of the blade against my skin. My fingers were numb, my control marginal at best. I took a deep breath, then got ready to—
“You need help?”
I startled, spinning around. McGlade stood in the doorway, buttoning his pants.
“Do I want to know why you’re pulling up your pants?” I asked.
“The little bastard shit on me. I returned the favor.”
“There’s something wrong with you.”
“Give me the Nife. You’re gonna cut your arm off.”
McGlade washed his hands, then took the blade. Unlike me, his hands were rock-steady. He opened up a U-shaped flap in my skin, deftly avoiding the major veins and arteries, while I chewed on a bath towel. Then he placed the chip back inside its nerve slot, closed the flap, and sealed it with the living skin. For my part, I only cried a little bit.
“Thanks, man. Let me know if I can ever return the favor.”
He looked at me, hard. “Just stop the bad guy and save the city.”
I appraised him. “You turning humanitarian on me, McGlade?”
“Fuck, no. I just don’t want all the stuff you owe me to get destroyed.”
He offered his hand. I took it.
Then I covered my chip with the obfuscation disk and went off to find Vicki and save Chicago.
FORTY-FOUR
Space elevators worked on the simple physics principle of centrifugal force. A large rope, made of woven carbon nanotubes, was anchored to the ground. It extended up to low-earth orbit, where it was tethered to a space station. The station acted like a yo-yo being twirled around, keeping the rope straight. In this case, the twirling was provided by the rotation of the earth.
Prior to space elevators, leaving earth’s atmosphere required an incredible amount of energy. Now a simple motorized lift could climb the two hundred miles to LEO using regular old electricity, rather than the expensive and bulky liquid hydrogen used by rockets. As a result, space had become a tourist attraction.
Chicago’s Arthur C. Clarke Space Elevator was one of the newest in the nation. It transported close to two million people a year to six hotels in geosynchronous orbit. Besides the spectacular view, and the novelty of zero gravity, these hotels offered an assortment of unique games and activities. They’d become one of the biggest tourist destinations in Illinois.
I ditched the bike a few blocks away from the station, and checked the time. Half an hour until Sata had told me to be there. As I dressed in the things I’d taken from Sata’s house, I tried to picture how I could pull this off without getting caught.
The CPD had red-flagged my name and run it through the system. If they didn’t already know Vicki had bought me an elevator ticket, they’d know it as soon as I arrived at the main gate. That meant the cops were already waiting for me on the off chance I showed up, or the place would be locked down once I got inside. I’d have to swipe my chip at check-in, and again at security.
Other than my clothing, there wasn’t much I could do to prevent a full-scale takedown. I’d either make it, or I wouldn’t. Dwelling on it wouldn’t improve my odds.
Lugging Sata’s suitcase, I walked over to the station entrance. The building was easy to find, viewable from miles away in any direction. The black nanotube tether was thick as a skyscraper, extending up into the clouds like Jack’s legendary beanstalk. Along the outside were lift cars on tracks, ten of them, simultaneously raising or lowering passengers in groups of fifty. The cars left every ten minutes, and a ticket allowed you to take any one you wanted, much like waiting in line for a roller coaster at a hyperamusement park.
I adjusted the celebrity veil over my head and strolled into the building, prepared for the worst. I wasn’t immediately tackled, which I took to be a good sign.
As expected, the station was packed. The building formed a decahedron around the tether, each inner section leading to a lift car. Departures and arrivals were staggered every fifteen minutes. The wraparound section was comprised of various shops and restaurants, a waiting area, and the check-in counter. There were at least two thousand people milling about, which was to my advantage. The bigger the haystack, the harder it was to find the needle.
Above the crowd murmur, a recording announced which cars were coming and going. The three o’clock would be car number seven. I strolled past, and saw a small line. No Vicki or Sata.
I walked the perimeter, which took only fifteen minutes, eyes peeled. I passed a few cops, but was ignored. A few dozen folks had celebrity veils on. Some of them might have been real celebrities, or celebrity wannabes, but a lot of teens also treated veils as a fashion statement. The emoticon on mine probably helped me pass for young and hip.
The check-in line went quickly. I unzipped the top of Sata’s bag, ready to throw on the men if the need arose. When it came time to scan my wris
t, I peeled off the obfuscation disk, swiped it over the reader, replaced it, and waited for the alarm to sound.
There was no alarm. The turnstile opened, allowing me through.
I looked around, trying to spot anyone coming for me. Utopeons milled about, minding their own business. I wasn’t rushed by cops. I wasn’t surrounded by government agents. Everything seemed entirely normal.
I queued up for the security checkpoint, waiting to get my bag X-rayed. Unlike airlines, which were a cinch to get through quickly, space elevators had to have security because certain things, like aerosol cans and, oddly enough, microwave popcorn, weren’t allowed in LEO. Nothing with the potential to explode was allowed up in space, though I believed the bias against popcorn had more to do with the difficulty in cleaning it up in zero gravity.
Again, I scanned for cops, or anyone who looked suspicious. But everything appeared normal. Besides the average Joes, there was a hyperspaceball team, in full gear, in the waiting area. So was a marching band, which seemed to be deep in a heated discussion of which car to take.
I was next in line when the first Taser hit me. I watched the Tesla bolt streak through the air and zap the front of my dô. Incongruously, it appeared to have been fired from a trombone. I managed to pull the men—the helmet—out of my suitcase and slap it over my head just as the bullets really began to fly.
Besides the full kendo armor I wore under my kimono, I’d also wound sheets of food preservative wrap around my arms and legs. In commercials, the plastic film boasted it was self-sealing and completely leak-proof. You couldn’t puncture it, no matter how hard you tried. I’d soon see if that guarantee included Taser needles.
The people around me toppled over, wax bullets zapping them right and left. Within three steps I’d been hit with more than a hundred Tasers, lighting me up like a Fourth of July firework. Both the hyperspaceball team and the marching band had been undercover cops, and much of their equipment and instruments were really Tasers in disguise.
Though it was getting impossible to see in the blinding blue electrical haze, I hadn’t actually felt a hit yet. The armor, and the food wrap, were keeping me safe, even though I was a walking Van de Graaff generator.
Then a bullet hit me in the hand—the only unprotected part of my body. Once the circuit was complete, the two hundred other Tesla bolts took the path of least resistance and entered my body through the hole. I folded like a bad poker hand, the pain spiking the meter somewhere between excruciating and unbearable. I could feel pressure in my eyeballs begin to build. The moisture in my mouth evaporated as my teeth began to glow.
I was going to die.
Unlike the many other times in the past twenty-four hours when I knew I was going to die, this one hurt the most. As I twitched on the ground, my only thought was to get it over quickly because it was so agonizing.
Then, a moment later, all the pain was gone. The electricity had stopped.
I wondered if I’d passed out. Or died.
No—I was on my knees, still in the station. I blinked away the mote flashes and looked around. The marching band, and the sports team, were gone. So were the people in the immediate area who had dived for cover.
I heard gunfire, followed the sound, and saw four cops—this time dressed as cops—shooting in another direction. A moment later, they disappeared.
Or perhaps imploded would be a better term.
One errant musician—a tuba player—dropped his instrument and beelined toward the exit. He vanished in midstep.
My brain was still scrambled by the dose of electricity I’d received, but I managed to figure out what was going on.
Sata. He was here.
I managed to stand, turning around in an unsteady circle, trying to spot my mentor. I found him walking casually up to me. Strapped across his chest was something that looked like a TEV, but also different. It had a black shell, which reflected light like a prism. And there was some sort of lens in front. When Sata pressed a button, the lens flashed—forming a miniature black hole and sucking people into nothingness. I watched him implode a whole family—mother, father, two kids—who were hovering under a plastic table in the food court.
“Sata!”
He looked at me and smiled. Then he disappeared a group of grade-school kids.
I pulled off my helmet and ran over, or at least tried to. After two steps I fell onto my face. I tried crawling, but my limbs still weren’t working right. Three hundred million volts will do that to a guy.
But I needn’t have bothered going to Sata. He came to me, turning occasionally to implode anyone he passed.
“Stop,” I told him.
“Stop what? This?” He pressed the button, taking out a fat man who’d been unable to quite make it around the bend.
“Enough, Sata. Please.”
“But it’s so much fun, Talon. When I think of all the years I wasted trying to protect these moronic, useless fools. What a colossal waste of carbon our species has become.”
I got to my feet, though I was wobbly. “Is this what you did with Vicki? Sucked her into a black hole?”
“Actually, it’s not a black hole. It’s a wormhole. I’m not technically killing these people. These utopeons, along with the unfortunate denizens of Boise, were sent to a parallel earth on another eleventh-dimensional membrane.”
“So they’re not dead?”
“Not when I send them there. But I have no idea how long they’ll last once they arrive. They’re now on an earth where the Chicxulub asteroid never caused the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event and wiped out the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. I suspect most of the unfortunate wretches have become food for superintelligent T. rexes by now. It’s quite amazing how much the dinos have evolved. They might even be smarter than us.”
I didn’t want to ask, but I had to. “And Vicki?”
He shook his head, slowly. “Talon, Talon, Talon. I wouldn’t send her to that awful place. She’s safe in Wisconsin, with someone watching her. Someone you’ve come to know intimately well.”
“Where is she, Sata?”
Sata smiled. “She’s with you, of course.”
FORTY-FIVE
Words don’t normally fail me. But when I processed what Sata had said, and all it implied, I was speechless.
Vicki wasn’t with me. She was with that psycho Alter-Talon.
“Yes, he’s here,” Sata said. “Dimensional travel to parallel worlds. Extraordinary, isn’t it? We’re supposed to view this primitive Tower of Babel”—Sata swept his hands at the space elevator—“as mankind’s crowning achievement. The pinnacle of technology and human ingenuity. And for what purpose? So people can play volleyball and hump each other in zero gravity? But with this”—he patted the TEV—“I can travel to places beyond mere space. I can access an infinite amount of worlds, with an infinite amount of variation. If it can be imagined, it exists. And I can see it all.”
“How…could you?” I managed.
Sata frowned at me. “I assume you mean, How could you send people to the man-eating dinosaur planet? instead of the far more compelling How could you accomplish this miracle of modern science? I’ll answer both. If you recall timecasting class, you know one of the many unique properties of tachyons, other than their ability to travel faster than the speed of light, is they have negative mass squared. Yet even with imaginary mass, they can decay to closed strings, which, in vibrational mode, can cause instability in spacetime itself. Can you even imagine?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t give two shits about the science. I just wanted him to keep talking until I was lucid enough to draw McGlade’s .44 Magnum, which was wedged in my chest plate.
Sata continued, “When I developed the tachyon emission visualizer, my immediate success was focusing this instability on our brane, to record the past in our universe. But at the same time, the disruption of spacetime caused by the tachyons opened wormholes to infinite other membranes. I ignored them, because even though it was theoretically pos
sible to tune in to those branes, I had no way of knowing which one I’d be on at a particular time. The vastness of infinity made the process entirely random. What I needed was a way to impose order on infinity. I needed…a search engine.”
“Aunt Zelda,” I said, slipping my hand inside my padding.
“Yes. Mister—or I suppose I should say Miss—Debont had perfected WYSIWYW search-engine technology with uffsee. But she had an even greater patent. One she never got to use. A way to compile relevant terms by metacrawling an infinite data source, using a geometric fractal algorithm. Anything that can happen, does happen, on some parallel earth. With her tech, and my tech, I could now search those infinite dimensions.”
My fingers wrapped around the butt of the gun. “So you searched the infinite multiverse for a world where I killed her, and where I destroyed Boise.”
“An excellent deduction. You’d think it would be an impossible task. Finding a needle in an infinite number of haystacks. But it was only impossible without a machine to help search for it. Because when there are infinite parallel earths, there are infinite parallel earths where you are a killer. With the search engine, I had a one in one chance of finding an earth that matched my exact criteria.”
“And you brought this lunatic to our world. Why, Sata? What happened to you?”
Sata assumed a reflective pose, tapping a finger to his chin. “I’ve thought about that a lot, Talon-kun. Maybe it was my growing disdain for our race, and how we waste the opportunities handed to us. Or maybe it’s because life has become so damn boring these days. Here I stand. The man that erased violent crime from humanity. And I now wish I hadn’t done it, because nothing interesting has happened on this planet in years. Admit it, Talon. Didn’t you get excited when you saw me murder Zelda? Didn’t you feel your heart racing?”
“You’re crazy,” I said.
“Yes. That’s the final conclusion I came to as well. My years of steroid abuse have severely compromised my judgment. But it’s still such great fun. Which brings us to the next part of my plan. Our space lift awaits. I’m going to give you a chance to stop me before I turn Chicago into a giant buffet spread for talking velociraptors. Won’t that be exciting? You and I, battling for the lives of eight million people? Head over to car number seven, please.”