Time Bandits Read online

  “What, you want me to spoil the ending?”

  Lizard Man fast footed it on all fours to the top of the building, then scuttled over to the lip of the roof, where he climbed on the railing and waited. Waited for the skydiver coming into the frame that Kendra hadn’t even noticed until now. Lizard Man took a flying leap off the building, his loose skin working like the parasail on a flying squirrel. He landed on the parachutist with precision. He then used his long rope-like tongue as a garrote on the parachutist, constricting at first, then ultimately scissoring off her head.

  “F-me. All that just to kill somebody?”

  “We think the woman he garroted was his girlfriend and they had a kinky thing going, until Spider Man upstaged Lizard Man. Everything else is jealous rage.”

  “God, if solving these cases is that easy, maybe I can get used to this dumbed down future. Any insight into who genetically altered this guy?”

  “None.”

  “The same guy who did my arm,” Monitor said, coming between them. Monitor was one of her detectives, tall, lanky, and up until this morning, with one arm. He showed off his regenerating limb, grown back to the elbow, which looked like a nub. “Doctor says it should finish growing back in a month or so.”

  She couldn’t take her eyes off his new arm. “You’re shitting me.”

  “So, what, dude, are you going to turn into Lizard Man, too?” Davenport inquired.

  “Nah. Some fools keep using the medicine, get hooked on it, gives you a natural high to counter the pain of all the nerves, bone, and tissue growing back. They just keep upping their dose long after they’ve healed.”

  “How long has this medicine been on the market?” Kendra asked.

  “Little over a year now,” Monitor said. He slipped back into the shadows where he did his best work. He was usually so quiet, she forgot he was even there.

  “How could this tech be on the market for over a year and I not know about it?” Kendra said.

  “Hey, who can keep up with any of it? At some point, girl, the rate of change reached the point to where if we wanted access to the present, we googled it. You could watch tech news twenty-four seven and barely catch one percent of the highlights.”

  “How do you keep a lid on a world like this?”

  “You can’t. I think that’s the whole point. Welcome to the new Renaissance, the real one, not the one they said started with the internet age. That was just the turning point, the harbinger of things to come. This is real democracy anymore. Real freedom. Real power to the people. An Age of Abundance. Any form of self-empowerment you want on the cheap, including stuff you haven’t even dreamed of yet.”

  “You can bet there are parasites out there as determined to make all this work for them as ever.”

  “Yeah, sure, thank God, or we’d be out of a job. But even if you wanted to play master of the universe, how the hell do you do that when not even a supercomputer can track and make sense of it all? All the mega-mind AIs can do is run simulations, hypothetical scenarios of which tech will exert a wider influence than the others. But that’s no different than a portal to a virtual multiverse, no one parallel universe any more compelling than the last. So the movers and shakers are reduced to watching how things actually play out before they can really jump on the horse and try to ride it. I think I’m getting my metaphors mixed up but you get the idea.”

  “Yeah, I get the idea, Davenport.” She took a deep breath and let it out to expunge the rising animosity and annoyance that he didn’t deserve; it was just her spinal cord reflex to breaking news.

  She picked her leather jacket up off the coat rack—somehow managing to reach it before the sloth did—and slung it over her shoulder. “Where are you going?” Davenport said.

  “Home, to consider a career change. I’m having second thoughts about even this dumbed down version of the present you’ve been kind enough to present to me.”

  “You can run but you can’t hide. Well, unless you want to live like me. Personally, I think you’d look great in a 1950s French Maid outfit.”

  She paused before leaving the squad room, took a look at the cross between Old MacDonald’s Farm and the city zoo. “How did we get here?”

  “Come on, boss. Subtract out the coin to be made manufacturing escapist fantasies for people who need a little help shock-proofing their minds, like the one you’re looking at, and all roads lead to Rome. Doesn’t matter which tech breakthrough comes first. The only money to be made is in making people smarter, more different, more unique, able to do something the competition can’t. Just like those lawyers who specialize in small niche practices to eliminate the competition from far too many lawyers.” Somehow watching the tropical birds that had evolved to stand out from all the other birds in their own inimical way just served to drive home his point. “A global marketplace filled with nothing but entrepreneurs, everyone competing against everyone. No big surprise uniqueness suddenly was the only marketable investment. But how to procure more of that? So walked in the door the genetic manipulators, the mind chip implanters, and all the rest. So I ask you, does it really matter on any given day what tech emerges, crawling out of the mound to declare itself king of the anthill?”

  “I see you’ve had time to get all philosophical about this.”

  “You don’t retreat into a 1950s paranoid schizophrenic break unless you’ve considered all other options, babe, unless, of course, you really are a paranoid schizophrenic.” Finished devouring the orange, he’d taken to carving up an apple and gave a wedge to an omnivorous heron-like bird, which eagerly swallowed it whole.

  “How come you don’t dress from the 1950s or talk that way when you’re at work?”

  “And have you and everyone else challenging my sanity at every turn? No, better, far better, if this is the paranoid schizophrenic break, and my wife has to call me back to reality every night I go home.”

  She smiled halfheartedly. “You’re no fool, Davenport.”

  “Just play the fool, ma’am. That’s my day job,” he said, saluting her.

  “I appreciate the salute, so long as I need this coping mechanism of actually being in charge around here, I mean.”

  “Anything I can do.” He winked and blew her a lewd kiss by smacking his lips too loudly. That just triggered a crescendo of mating dances from the tropical birds, determined not to be outdone. She threw a last glance at Davenport, suddenly looking like one of the trickster birds himself in his latest ridiculous sculpted hairdo—the maze of swirling lines shifted every few days to foil any escape artist—and she turned her back on the lot of them.

  Her first thought heading out the door was if the robot animals didn’t poop, where did the food Davenport was feeding them go? She decided she could let that mystery lie for now. A larger insight seemed eager to press that one out of her mind in any case. Thinking about Davenport and Wilimino’s Escapes From the Present, it occurred to her that Clyde Barker’s hopping timelines might be an escape along the same lines. Maybe the future he wanted for all of them was more of a back-to-the-past kind of thing. Maybe his way of empowering humans to be like gods relied not on technology but on old school methods. Like those Tibetan monks levitating coffee tables with just their minds. His reliance on psychic abilities spoke to powers boasted by exceptional human beings throughout history, certainly, but also unupgraded ones. The commune he’d fostered also functioned admirably with a minimum of technology to boost human capacities through the roof. She wasn’t sure how this insight was going to get her any closer to him, but it was something.

  ***

  Back at home at last, Kendra could feel the tension leeching from her body the instant she stepped through the door.

  She surveyed her own retreat from the world. Nothing but warm earth tones with deep royal color accents. It was an abstraction of the natural world. Not a metallic surface in the flat. Even the kitchen appliances were masked by beige enamel exteriors. The plush furniture and pillows that she sank into, just like the down pil
lows and comforter on her bed, all suggested how hard-edged and abrasive she found the outside world by contrast. Without knowing it, she was carving the same escape pod from the modern world as Davenport, only hers had been made far more crudely and now it no longer served to protect her from reality.

  Maybe Davenport had given her another out without realizing it. If he could slip into the past so could she. Chasing after Clyde Barker might well mean slipping into a past relative to their time in another timeline; hell, even another future, might not be quite as futuristic as the one they were facing. If she could condition her mind to just grant access to those alternative timelines then she could give herself a better coping mechanism on the here and now than she currently had, one that was even better than Davenport’s solution. Not to mention a tad less rigid. She had to keep her mind supple enough, after all, if she ever expected to close the dragnet on her prey. She did need a form of desensitization therapy, just not one she could find at the office. Traveling into these alternate realities would be her desensitization therapy, conditioning her one portal stepped through after another to better cope with the far more mind-blowing here and now.

  No doubt Torin would appreciate her saving him going hoarse trying to convince her to follow after him. The question was, had he made any headway with pioneering the technique for stepping into these alternate worlds?

  THIRTEEN

  “Take that! And that! Oh, you think you’ve got player’s panache, do you?” Torin pressed buttons on his controller, effectively playing both sides of the space battle, as Kendra stood watching hang jawed. Gawking as a grown man played with spaceships zooming through his palatial flat, in and out of rooms, firing actual lasers that were wreaking havoc with his décor.

  There went the lamp, knocked over by a proton blast.

  Apparently the ships fired more than just lasers. There went the couch, currently going up in flames courtesy of dual proton torpedoes. “Damn it! Oh, well, time you got rid of that flea-bitten rats nest of a sofa, anyway,” he yelled.

  “Torin! It’s an Eaves original. It’s worth more than my car!”

  “You should learn to let go, Kendra, of your past, of everything. How do you think I stay so happy?”

  “I think you use childlike zeal the way most people use OCD.”

  “Ouch. Now tell me what you really think.”

  She waited impatiently as he disappeared into a room. The hardwood floors glistened. Subtract the furniture destroyed by the recent mayhem and the place was immaculate. Whoever his maid was, she was good. Better than good. Better than what she could afford. And as to his interior designer… wow! Someone elegant and refined and sophisticated lived here, not this man child. Maybe it was his parent’s place. Maybe there really was more to his personality than what he showed her.

  Her ruminations were rudely interrupted as he came flying around the corner in a spaceship all his own, chasing after the small ones, firing on them, and sending them, with each hit, smashing into a wall, where they made impact craters if they didn’t get permanently lodged in the stucco or hardwood. One laser blast was so off its mark it cut a line across the entire wall. He lost electricity in that room as he severed one or more of the wires with the laser blast.

  Kendra got out her gun and started shooting the smaller ships herself. Partly because in an effort to defend themselves they had barely missed taking her head off twice. Partly because the sooner this game was over the sooner she could get around to giving him a piece of her mind.

  The flying saucers were relatively immune to the lead she was pumping out of her gun barrel, but it did cause the little ones to ricochet into the walls hard enough for them to fall to the floor and linger until they got their bearings. Time she put to her advantage by pinning them under the leg of an armchair or an ottoman.

  Finally, the battle was over. “Hey, where did they all go?” Torin complained.

  “I may have tilted the scales a little, in the direction of sanity,” she said, sheathing her weapon in the holster under her arm.

  He grimaced and landed his ship, which hovered for a while before putting down legs. When Torin climbed out he fixed himself a drink from the vessel’s innards. Apparently his “mother ship” doubled as a wet bar. “What’s your fancy? I’m guessing you’re a brandy person.”

  “It’s the middle of the morning.”

  “Some detective you are. It’s the middle of the night.”

  She went over and ripped open the curtains, sending light pouring into the room like cement coming out of the back end of a mixer, and nearly burying him alive under all the carelessly spilled photons. “Fine, so it’s day,” he said, holding up his hand to protect his eyes. “You mind?”

  She grabbed him and turned him around so his back was to the wicked sunlight. “Okay, that does help,” he confessed.

  “Out of curiosity, how much did this little game set you back?” She was still taking in the destruction.

  “Nothing terribly significant, if you’re a multi-billionaire, anyway. When I come back tonight my little elves will have restored the place to picture perfect condition.”

  “Your little elves?”

  “The interior designer, the construction people, the electrician, the maids...”

  “Are they robots or real people?”

  “If I were a robot, I’d be offended by that remark.”

  She glared at him. “Robots,” he said. “You think I’d turn my back on this place if real people were here when I was gone? I don’t have the kind of trust issues you do, but I’m not gullible either.”

  She passed her hand over a wood figurine of Charles Atlas, holding up the world on bended knee. The room was dotted with the fine miniature sculptures, no more than twelve inches high. “Out of curiosity, what are your billions based on?”

  “Family inheritance. Dad makes high tech toys for the war department, for civilian life. Masher, Inc. Maybe you’ve heard of it. Our logo is ‘stomping out the past.’ Hence, Masher. Get it?”

  “No wonder you never grew up. You’re sitting on top of the biggest adult toy factory in the world.”

  “That, and I wouldn’t be a responsible board member if I didn’t test out these prototypes firsthand, would I? Just thinking of the future of humanity, keeping people safe, and all that.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Continuing to wander within a defined radius of his person, she passed her hand over the Sisyphus sculpture. The muscle man pushing the boulder uphill groaned and sweated mightily for all his efforts, even if the audio effects were only captured in petrified silence. “And the ships, they use real anti-gravity?”

  He smiled at her and tilted his head slightly to the side. “Had you going, didn’t I? Actually it’s all done with magnets, lining the ships, the floor, the walls. As an added bonus, it turns out magnet therapy is a form of healing, makes you smarter and re-energizes you, like all those negative ions are said to do for people who live near the ocean. Similar idea, actually.”

  She rolled her eyes and shook her head.

  “Mind you, we do have anti-gravity technology, we just can’t talk about it. One of those Area 51 things. Part of planetary defense systems and the tech kept in-check for fighting off real spaceships piloted by real aliens, should they prove hostile.”

  She smirked at him, figuring he was putting her on. “I gather you’re a fan of the HAARP conspiracy theories too, you know the ones that say the towers up in Alaska are for throwing a planetary forcefield around the planet.”

  “That’s no conspiracy theory. And it’s actually just one of the things they do. But I’m afraid I must deny this conversation ever happened, that or kill you and anyone you actually convince what I said is true.”

  “That must be what I like about you. I can never tell when you’re kidding and when you’re being serious, and what’s real and what’s not real with you. These days, that’s just how I like my reality, so if I can’t handle it, I can pretend none of it is real.”

  “Why, thank y
ou. Any other healing I can do for you today?” He twitched his eyebrows and pulled her into the shaft of light that he refused to stand in himself for closer examination.

  She ignored the sexual innuendo. Noting instead the Giacometti sculpture; she was sensing a theme. This one was withered to the bone for all his hard labors; she got the sense it was carrying all his worries around that ate him alive from the inside. The others that could channel their self-loathing into physical actions alone held on to a beefier physique. “Not to be an old nag, but I thought we were living together now, and you know, married?”

  “It’s just my man cave. Besides, too much proximity takes the bubbles out of the bubble bath, know what I mean?”

  She found the corners of her lips turning down reflexively, her reaction halfway between annoyed and amused.

  “What brings you calling on my home away from home this early,” he asked, “if you don’t want to wear me like a tight fitting leather jacket?”

  She noted the Rhodin Sculpture of “the thinker”, looking burdened by his worries, as well, before she finally let go the chore of trying to ascertain what else lay behind Torin’s particular psychological defense mechanisms. “You’re supposed to be divining some way to slip us out of this timeline and into another one so we can track down Clyde Barker.”

  “Ah, so you’re actually on board with that project now.” He was using the fact that she was standing in the beam of light and he was in the relatively darkened interior just beyond it to mask his poring through her purse. Somewhat amused, she let him continue with his subterfuge uninterrupted.

  “Only since realizing that there really is no coping with Future Shock, I mean Present Shock, at least not for people like me.”

  “By that you mean rigid people with inflexible boundaries and fixed ways of looking at the world.” He pulled out her compact, twisted the two sides and nearly cut himself on the blades that sprung out each side, turning it into a ninja weapon, a Shuriken to be exact. He gulped and twisted the compact again to retract the blades.