“But how was the rage room energy collected and stored?” I was trying to picture it in my mind.
“In electrochemical capacitors. They used to be called double-layer Supercapacitors but now they’re called Iracapacitators, ira being Latin for rage. They store electrical charges at a surface-electrolyte interface of high-surface-area carbon electrodes. But Sharps, we’re veering off topic here.”
She was right. I had no idea what the heck she was talking about. I decided to stick with topics I had an actual grasp on.
“And no one noticed your mother and Dr. Horvarth and you guys doing all this stuff?” I asked.
“It was fairly easy to fly under the radar. However, my mother and Dr. Horvarth constantly lived in terror that they would be found out and killed for the intel. Money wasn’t what motivated my mother or Dr. Horvarth, but you imagine the dollar bills this could have brought in. There are people out there on the black market, survivalists who’ll do anything to stock up their underground larders. But Sharps, you haven’t connected the dots yet, and I’m a little disappointed.”
“What do you mean?”
“The teeth! It’s all about the teeth!”
Now I really had no idea what was going on.
47. TEETH
“REMEMBER WHEN EVERYBODY’S TEETH fell out?” Sting Ray Barb asked, and I nodded. “That was no accident. Minnie’s fav buddy on the Sacred Board was a crazy dictator from some ‘stan’ empire: Türkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan—one of those eastern countries who refused to be sainted or dubbed Real Life this or that. God knows the guy’s name; it’s one of those unpronounceable three-sentence, a-hundred-syllable epics. He was a dentist before he was a dictator, and he came up with the idea for dental implant hard drives. Sure, we all had Crystal Path chips, but it took Minnie about three seconds to realize that she wanted more control than the Path’s capacity could afford her. Besides, the chips had started to show their age and couldn’t take any further upgrades, so voilà, in came the great water scandal. We all lost our teeth and were given new dentures jam-packed with a new super powerful hidden internal hard drive. They poisoned the water in order to fit us up with two petabytes of memory.”
“A petabyte?”
“A million terabytes a person!”
“But why on earth would we need all that memory in our teeth?” None of it made any sense to me.
“We didn’t, really,” Mother said. “Even Minnie didn’t need that much for her new software. She just figured it might come in handy down the line. And while she didn’t end up utilizing it, we did. She did us a favour.”
I must have looked as confused as I felt.
“Let’s backtrack a bit,” Mother said, and she sounded as if she was feeding mashed-up bananas to an infant. I was waiting for here comes the airplane, open wide—although come to think of it, she’d never been that gentle. “You’re hooked up to the Crystal Path via the chip in your brain. You with me so far?”
“No need for sarcasm,” I shot back, remembering in that moment why I killed her. We stared at one other.
“So you hacked the Crystal Lattice?” I asked. “And the Crystal Lattice is stored in our teeth?”
“No!” Mother said, looking exasperated. “The Crystal Lattice is just a highway of information; we didn’t hack it. We needed access to the single repository, the location with everyone’s info. In other words, Minnie’s Vatican. Of course she’d dub her mainframe with a name like The Vatican. The woman was consistent to say the least. Miles and miles of hard drives—bigger, in total, than the size of St. Magnus, the great state formerly known as Texas—all hard at work recording every file sent, every image taken, and every message exchanged. First, we had to install software in your dental hard drive, which would allow us to process and store the data, then we hacked into The Vatican and downloaded the data into the time travel candidate’s teeth.”
“The time travel candidate,” I echoed. “How warm and fuzzy of you, Mother.”
She shrugged. “That’s what Sting Ray Barb was doing when you thought your teeth were falling apart. She was installing software and downloading the data of your life. All of which hurts like the blazers. One candidate mentioned it was like having your nerve endings pulverized by dirty bombs.”
My tongue moved around my teeth in a swift motion and I nodded emphatically.
“Who are you really?” I mumbled at Sting Ray Barb, keeping my mouth firmly closed.
“I’m on the military side,” she replied vaguely. “In an unofficial capacity. I’m really an autodidact, and my mother helped me fill in the gaps.”
“You’ve got a heavy hand with a scalpel, I’ll tell you that much,” I snapped at her. “I thought I was going to die of pain and go nuts from the hallucinations.”
“Yep. Sorry about that. I had to reload the data a few times and reboot. You kept crashing on me. I even had to force quit a few times, and I was worried that the open files had corrupted. I had to delete them once you were up and running again, then gracefully shut down and try the install again.”
“What do you mean, I crashed? I’m not a computer!”
“Sorry, the Easter Bunny crashed, not you. The Easter Bunny is the software program installed on the tooth. For some reason, I really struggled to manage the software install. It’s a complex program and takes a lot of processing power from both the hard drive and the candidate. It wasn’t as easy as it should have been, given that you were subject forty-nine. I thought perhaps I was encountering some kind of unconscious resistance, but that didn’t make any sense. Then I realized I was struggling because the tooth’s hard drive, while separate from the Crystal Path chip, is intrinsically and unavoidably piggybacked onto the chip’s software. This is far from ideal, given the aging nature of that technology, in addition to which the chip reacts to brain activity in a way that the dental hard drives cannot. There’s no way around it, not currently anyway. But I was correct, you were fighting me tooth and nail, ha ha, which is why you kept crashing.”
She looked off into the distance as if she was trying to figure out a theorem, and I snapped my fingers at her.
“You were putting an Easter Bunny in my mouth,” I reminded her. She glared at me and continued.
“Yes. Mom started out as a dentist in the Secret Service Army, but she was also a tech geek, and when she met up with Dr. Horvarth, they were unstoppable. The Easter Bunny, an advanced processing system, was their invention. Basically, if a person’s life, and the lives of those they encountered, were downloaded into a single individual, then that person, contingent upon them fitting the other parameters, as outlined previously by your mother, opened the door, if you’ll excuse the bad pun, to travel through time.” She looked embarrassed. “I really need to work on the elevator pitch for that,” she admitted. “But, in a long-winded nutshell, that’s how it works. And, in this way, vast stores of energy were cached, ready for satellite shutdown. You guys created our backup generator.”
“Fortunately for us,” Noelle interjected, “the Sacred Dental Procedure became mandatory, even for those born after the water scandal, or if they had somehow escaped it. Everyone with the right genes was a potential candidate for time travel.”
“Not everyone!” Sting Ray Barb chuckled. “My mother made sure I kept my original teeth just like good ole Minnie kept hers. My teeth are some of the only originals left. I’m a rare creature! And while not everyone was really a potential candidate for time travel, they all came with new teeth, like it or not. The software alone ate up more than a terabyte, and then you had to add the data of everyone’s lives.”
“Which meant only one person could jump at a time; the system couldn’t cope otherwise. It was crazy how we, the underground warriors, ended up with the most powerful tool at our disposal and the big guns had no idea!” Mother laughed, a beautiful sound I hadn’t heard in years.
“Back t
o recent events. Shasta nearly screwed things up by jumping with you,” Noelle said. “But it turns out we learned a lot from her. Something in the equation changed, and her shotgun ride proved that more than one person can jump at a time.”
Shasta. I hadn’t even thought about her. “What happened to her?” I asked, and Sting Ray Barb waved towards the campgrounds. “We recruited her. She’s as good as new. She loves it here. She’s got a great future too, all the markings of a leader.”
Shasta? Really? “One happy ending at least,” I said, sarcastically, although I was glad to hear that Shasta was all right. “Meanwhile I’m just a hamster on a wheel, and every time I run, you get the energy and power you need. You guys are monsters!”
“No need to see it in such a negative light,” Noelle said. “We had great sex, you learned you could get it up without a hole in the wall, and you saved your kids from being killed by their loving dad or warped by their pervert of a mother. Win-win, if you ask me.”
“I don’t want to jump back,” I said. I was exhausted. “You say you’ve rejuvenated me but I feel shot to hell.” On top of which, I had lost everything. My clean, tidy, sunny world. My friends. The woman I thought I had loved. Nothing was real. All I had left was the fact that I’d been used and hung out to dry. And I was soaking wet and freezing cold in a muddy field. No, I didn’t see the results as a win, the only exception being my kids.
“Of course you’re tired,” Mother said, and she put her hand on my shoulder. There it was again, Jaxen’s kindness. It was odd to feel that kind of warmth from Mother and I burst into tears. I sobbed, my face in my hands, and when I finally came up for air, Sting Ray Barb was holding out a large sheet of paper towel and Noelle was looking away, as if embarrassed and discomforted by what she’d seen.
“Sorry,” I said, but Mother shook her head. “It’s a lot to take in. You’re doing very well, Sharps. You are.” High praise that made me feel a bit better.
A thought occurred to me. “What happened to the Blowflies? With all this?” I waved my hand around, and you’d have thought I’d won an award for stand-up comedy, with the way Mother, Sting Ray Barb, and Noelle reacted.
“Oh, Sharps!” Sting Ray Barb finally said when she could talk again and I was getting annoyed. “We are Blowflies. All of us here. You don’t think you guys started the revolution, do you? Why would you? Why would you destroy your comfortable, pretty, shiny lives? That’s hilarious.”
Noelle was still grinning, but there was malice in her smile as she moved closer to me. “You think we liked living in high-rise prisons? You think we liked the fact that you were quietly killing us? We stopped eating your food and grew our own, in places like this, off the grid, and no one noticed and no one cared. We stopped taking your drugs. We educated ourselves since we weren’t welcome in your universities.”
“And I defected,” Mother said. “And the rest is history. Listen, great chatting, but come on. Sharps, let’s get you back to St. Drogo’s for one last jump. You may not feel like it, but you’re physically sound and good to go.”
I looked around. I had no friends here. There was nothing I could do but acquiesce. I rubbed my face hard, digging my fingers into my eye sockets and pushing the pressure points until I saw stars. I decided it was best to go along with whatever they said and then try to figure out a Plan B that saved my ass and got me away from these crazy psycho bitches. They were without mercy. And they thought I was the one with issues? I needed to get out of their clutches. “Okey dokey,” I said meekly. “Let’s do this thing then.”
Noelle didn’t come with us. Oh, how I mourned the loss of my Janaelle. My heart was broken, shattered. I truly wished I could love Noelle the way I’d loved Janaelle, but I wasn’t to blame for that, was I? Noelle hadn’t even really said goodbye; she gave a mock salute and a twisted smile and then disappeared into a canvas tent. And it wasn’t because she looked different, although certainly that was disconcerting to say the least. Where had all her tenderness and love gone? But I knew the answer to that: he who hesitates is lost and I hesitated and lost. But she had lied to me on so many levels. Had she simply been role-playing? She’d been so convincing. I’d meant to ask her about her tattoo, but I didn’t get the chance. For all I knew, she’d had something else done and I’d seen what I wanted to. I guess I’d never know the truth when it came to her.
I wasn’t impressed by the surroundings when they walked me to the car. The campgrounds were filthy, and the she-soldiers, as Mother told me they were called, all stank to high heaven. It was an army of women, not a man in sight.
“No men at all?” I asked.
“Not yet. They have to prove their worth. The women in Real Life South Africa made that decision. Men can join the resistance, but they’re part of a lower-echelon and they do jobs more suited to them, heavy lifting, assembling weapons and equipment, and building housing. We’re the thinkers, the planners.”
I stopped to watch bio implants being administrated by a scary-looking nurse who moved with speedy precision.
“What are those for?” I asked Sting Ray Barb, watching the stern-faced woman prep a syringe with a small metal pellet and shoot it into a she-soldier’s webbed flesh between her forefinger and thumb.
“Location microchipping along with identification and personal stats. We’re going back in time as much as we can, but the reality is that we still need to be able to keep track. The day will come when the individual goes back to being purely organic, but it will take a while. We have to be vigilant because there will be a war, Sharps. World War III. A clash of the ages. We’ve been gearing up for it. Those microchips will tell us the locations and mental, emotional, and physical status of the she-soldiers.”
“Where will this war be fought?”
“Here. In St. Polycarp, over in St. Isidore, all around the world. That’s what a world war is, Sharps—everybody gets involved.”
“But for what? It’s not like we have countries worth saving anymore, we’re one big united mess. What are we fighting for?”
“Pro Patria!” Sting Ray Barb shouted, and she’d lost her smile. “What on earth do you think? Why did we even bother with you, Sharps?” She turned to Mother. “You said if this guy achieved it, it would prove that we’d be victorious. You said that.”
What did she mean? “Victorious about what, Mother?” I asked, and my chest immediately filled with my old friend, anger. My lethargy and heartbreak circled back into my old familiar friend, blood red, scalp-prickling fury. I clenched my fists and stared at Mother, feeling betrayed all over again.
“You helped us prove a crucial theory about cause and effect,” Mother said calmly. “Ground-breaking insights and data about the variables of consequence. You’ve helped us more than you can possibly imagine. In that way, you’ve done me proud. We learned so much more from you than genetics could reveal or psych evaluations could uncover. We’ve increased our insights into human frailty, expectations, vulnerability, and how all of those immeasurable and yet unavoidable elements can make or break the practical application of a hypothesis. We also learned how the memories and fears of one person will affect his perception of a given event and how that might differ from what actually happened. And we know why you succeeded where forty-eight others didn’t. It wasn’t genetics either.”
“And what was it? Why did I succeed?”
Mother looked at me and shook her head. “Because you’re the perfect anger machine. I don’t know why, Sharps, but your fundamental, instinctive, feral rage is a rare thing. There are some things that even science can’t explain.”
The pinprick of her words deflated me. Yes. That was me: Mr. Angry. From the cradle to the grave.
I turned back to watch the nurse shoot another pellet into an outstretched hand then slap a bandage on the she-soldier’s hand and wave her on.
I wondered why they weren’t micro-chipping me, but then I realized they already had.
48. NO ESCAPE
I SAT IN THE BACK OF THE STATION BUBBLE as we drove from St. Adrian to the outskirts of St. Cornelius. The view along the way wasn’t promising. The homeless and the hungry prowled the highways, wandering into the roads, and we had to weave around them as the rain continued to pour down, a relentless curtain of oily grey slush.
“Here’s your bike,” Sting Ray Barb thrust it at me as she lifted it down from the rack. “Good luck.”
“See you later ’gator,” I said to Mother, trying to inject a modicum of levity into our farewell and failing. She grabbed me and hugged me. “Don’t forget, Sharps,” she said, “that every moment of every day is a new chance to be the man you really want to be. Don’t let your past overwhelm you.”
Easy for you to say, I wanted to retort but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even say goodbye. I looked at her for a moment, shouldered my backpack with supplies, and rode away as fast as I could. I didn’t look back.
This trip was far worse than the first one I made after the Evolution had hit hard. Rats, squirrels, and feral dogs had somehow repopulated, and they roamed the streets, but the worst were the cats. They chased me, ravenous, with hungry looks in their eyes, and their long curved teeth bared. They looked more like cheetahs or panthers, roaming for kill. I had to kick them away as I cycled. Half-covered pits held random fires that added to the heat, and the smoky stench of smouldering tires, wood, and gasoline mingled with the rain which fell in a thick syrupy glop, like alien saliva in a B-grade sci-fi movie. The world was a stew of sweat, smoke, and mucus, and I fought my way through it, hardly able to breathe.
I passed the Sky The Tower and I saw a giant MosaliTitans flag proclaiming victory. The wind rippled through it and it fluttered with proud defiance. Yeah, you won, I thought. But at what cost?
The Rage Room Page 29