Time Bandits Read online

  She squeezed her eyes shut and combusted the woman at a distance. He hadn’t turned around to check, but the scent of burning flesh was wafting towards him on the brisk breeze. Not to mention the blessed warmth of the fire against the sphincter-tightening cold. The yelp of sound that had managed to escape Ms. Inconvenient had been sucked in pretty quickly by the tornado of flame no doubt raging about her right now. The muted outcry was just a bonus; he certainly hadn’t calculated for it. He doubted Notchka had either; it most certainly owed more to the strength of her powers than to premeditation.

  “My access to these psychic abilities is not vindicated by Western science. Though there appears to be some support for them in the science of the Far East, pertaining to an underlying energy body, energy chakras, and the movement of Chi.”

  “Yes, dear, we’ll talk more about that later. For now, suffice to say your nanites, concentrated at your body’s seven primary chakras, and your secondary chakras as well, allows you access to enhanced psychic abilities far beyond an un-upgraded human.”

  “That is not the complete explanation.”

  “Ahem,” Clyde said, clearing his throat, in no mood to get into this now. “Yes, dear, more on that later as well.”

  FIVE

  Four Star General Mortimer Wrenfield, “Morty” to his closest friends, surveyed the big screen of the operations room. On it was running some eye-opening footage. They’d gotten the HD, 3D coverage from all the choice angles of Notchka dispensing with the fitness instructor at the gym in real time. And they’d gotten some equally memorable shots of the endearing father and daughter scene out on the sidewalk shortly thereafter, whereupon an innocent pedestrian doing her Good Samaritan act for the day was turned into a pillar of flames shortly thereafter for her troubles.

  “She is a marvel, isn’t she?” Morty said proudly, sipping his coffee. Morty specialized in marvels. The military had little use for much else these days. Even robots had to come off the assembly line with “exceptional” written all over them as opposed to “standard issue.” As for himself, at sixty-five, able to do more pushups than most sixteen year olds, and run uphill better than a pack mule with a full backpack on… all off will power, mind you; there wasn’t a single upgrade he depended on for a crutch. In his position he could afford the vanity. The brainier types answered to him in this upside down world where the highest IQs served the highest EQs. Robots not exactly excelling in the latter area, either, were certainly no threat to him and the natural pecking order. As for the rest of humanity…

  “We’ve got to get her away from that mad man,” Derringer said. Derringer was his right-hand man, hired to second-guess him on every decision. A duty he relished; he was as quick to do so as the firearm after which he took his name was quick at dispensing justice. Young. Bright. Not exactly standard issue; in his case, Morty wasn’t sure that was a good thing. There were many ways around the rigors of boot camp, if you could do with information gathering what Derringer could across encrypted datanets. That said, he served his purpose ably. A divergent thinker by nature, he could find a hundred and one ways things could go wrong in five seconds flat. His ADHD was subclinical, just enough to bolster the effects of his free associating, and probably all but genetically expected in an internet age of hyperlinks, where standard narratives were routinely sabotaged by interactive readers changing the storyline to suit themselves. The market was hyper-saturated with his type of individual, which made his ability to stand out all the more impressive. And Morty had too many globally-impacting decisions to not be questioned on any of them in ways that were intelligent and timely. And though few would agree with him on this matter, he still had a conscience.

  “Nonsense. I think Clyde Barker is doing a bang up job raising her. At this rate she’ll be the perfect terrorist weapon by the time she’s eleven. You can’t buy this kind of government brainwashing.”

  Derringer flinched. As young, fit, and able as his body was, his nervous system was even faster, often betraying him before he could clamp down on it. That led to certain delights in the bedroom, such as Derringer’s eyes going wide every time he gazed on Morty’s unzippered cock, or his inability to hide how much he was struggling against his own gag reflex every time Monty shoved his pecker into his mouth. What good was a subordinate if you couldn’t make him literally choke on your power?

  Morty doubted Derringer’s current flinching at the “can’t buy this kind of brainwashing” remark had anything to do with a conscience in his case. More likely, he was anticipating the many ways the human mind has from crawling out from under the most totalitarian of regimes. His favorite quote was from Thomas Pynchon, author of Gravity’s Rainbow. “Nothing breeds chaos like a hyper-controlled situation.” As good an explanation for Singularity state as any, Morty imagined, and a technological age where anyone, but anyone was empowered to take down the entire interconnected global marketplace. According to Derringer that was the only way to truly shockproof global civilization, with everyone thinking like them, out of the box, only interconnected, with mind chips, to the point of a telepathic society. Ordinarily he’d have had Derringer shot with his own gun for suggesting such a thing. As it was, the thought of such a transparent society with everyone watching everyone twenty-four seven made his dick hard. And they weren’t too far from that reality now.

  He turned to “the Eye.” Their clairvoyant. Sitting in a lotus position. His hands resting on his knees, palms up, and thumb and index fingers pressed together. He wore nothing but loose-fitting drawstring pants, his exposed torso ramrod straight. His long jet black braided hair down to his butt and fine features gave him an androgynous appearance. “The Eye” was projecting these images for them by broadcasting his visions from his third eye at the center of his forehead, unseeable to them—a power center often utilized by psychics—onto the big screen. He was one of Clyde’s earlier projects. Hand it to Clyde, the man had a way of keeping biological enhancements running well ahead of the AI learning curve, something no one would have thought possible a few years ago. By all saner predictions, even upgraded humans should be falling behind what robots and artificial intelligence could do by now. Of course, the naysayers may yet have their day in court now that Clyde was working off the reservation.

  That would be a pity. Considering that this girl made “The Eye” appear so primitive as to belong to another millennia. That was a lot of progress in such a short time. No amount of genius should have been able to explain it. But maybe a certain amount of madness could. The type that made saner approaches to progress unthinkable. The kind that found shortcuts where no one else could. In short, much like with Derringer, Clyde was proving that the least of us, the most broken psychologically speaking, the most unable to deal with the dizzying pace of technological change, the most unable to assimilate it without simply breaking for lack of the necessary suppleness and openness of mind, might well inherit the earth.

  Not just despite his madness but because of it, Morty was one for giving Clyde’s genius the freedom it needed to be innovative. There was no point in micromanaging his wunderkinds; if anything, that was the quickest way to see them self-destruct. A lesson the rest of his kind in the leadership hierarchy had trouble understanding. Explaining why he had to take this entire operation off-line, joining the ranks of alphabet soup agencies which simply didn’t exist, should anyone ask.

  One thought nagged him: how right was Derringer? How right was his mentor Thomas Pynchon? Had they succeeded in clamping down on people so much they had nowhere to run except into the deepest recesses of their own minds, all the way past their fears and inner demons, until, much like with Dante, bursting through the last ring of hell, they find they’ve actually found a shortcut to the Godhead, and to unbridled power? If that was the case, Clyde Barker and his young female protégé were the least of their problems. And this nexgen weapon he was now cultivating as a game changer, was anything but. She was just evidence that the game had changed; that they’d succeeded beyond their wild
est expectations; so much so that they’d created a race which could not now or ever more be fully contained. He put the thought out of his mind; it was just too unthinkable. Some might view that as a true Aquarian age of equality for all he was contemplating. Monty was too much of a realist for that. He knew playing with one stick of dynamite was dangerous enough. There was no safeguarding humanity when the whole world became one big powder keg.

  “You think the child will pick up on our psychic dogging her?” Derringer asked, eyes still glued to the big screen, evidently afraid if he looked away for an instant, he’d regret it. Morty couldn’t blame him for feeling that way based on what they’d seen so far.

  “She might, sooner or later. If Clyde doesn’t keep her busy enough and sufficiently distracted. Or if she just grows too powerful to be fully preoccupied by whatever missions he assigns her and neglects to cue him.”

  “Clyde has to know we’re using the Eye. Hell, he created him. Why hasn’t he put the girl on alert?”

  “A test for her perhaps. Or he’s becoming addle, and just can’t keep track of all his breakthroughs anymore. Or his OCD-like focus on his latest mission blocks most everything else out of his mind. Your guess is as good as mine. We’ll take advantage of the loophole for now, while it lasts.”

  “How do you think he’s been able to get her to do what she can do so far?” Derringer asked, eyes still glued to the projected images.

  “That’s the million dollar question. And why we’re just going to keep watching from a safe distance for now.” Monty had his suspicions but he couldn’t be sure. Clyde was tops in DNA computing. In Quantum computing. In most anything having to do with computing. Just possibly he’d figured out how to link human DNA to the quantum and even the sub-quantum realm, making zero point energy available. That would make this psychic girl, and the biopunk upgrades which saturated her, not just a potential planet killer, but able to work her magic on an extra-planetary level, taking advantage of such peculiar properties as quantum nonlocality, allowing her to affect outcomes across unfathomable reaches of space. Perfect for a Space Age that might well encounter hostiles out there for which there were no current countermeasures worth a damn. “Honestly, if we can figure out how the girl does what she does, make that technology available to us, I don’t much care if she reduces the entire human population to ash. A worthwhile sacrifice all in all to birth the next generation soldier on line.” And one way out from under his worst nightmare, what’s more, of a world full of people like her, with no way of knowing when the fruit had ripened on the vine, no way of tracking them all, and no way of staying in control.

  SIX

  Kendra looked around at the designer everything of Chez Louis, from the sterling silver table settings to the jade green tuxedos the waiters were wearing, to the well-clad customers themselves. Those dresses belonged strictly on the clone of Vanna White of Wheel of Fortune. It was all a bit much. As if no one in the room could handle a stain on the reality of their existence, a single inopportune moment. God knows how unglued they would become facing far less pressure than most; forget what she faced on a typical day. “I can’t believe you invited me to such a fine restaurant just to discuss the details of the case.”

  “Not just,” Torin said, twirling his wine glass by the stem.

  She was already getting lost in the poem of his fingers about the glass whose stanzas were framed by the flawless manicure, the ridges of his knuckles. Even the fingerprints he left on the glass deserved to be enlarged so they could grace some wall at the Met in the latest modern art exhibit. “Is this you making a pitch at me for the umpteenth time?”

  “You know what it’s like for a psychic to tune out all these extraneous minds in such close proximity, chattering away about most everything, to focus just on you?”

  She smiled despite herself. “You were always one for the grand gestures.”

  Their food arrived. “I took the liberty of ordering,” he said.

  “Of course you did.” Her scorn turned to admiration in quick order as she got a load of the dish in front of her. Her resistance melted further as she bit into the steak. “My God. I could get arrested for feeling this good.”

  He smiled. “You want to wait to discuss the blood and guts until desert?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, egging him on with a gesture as she continued to focus her attention on the food.

  “Fine then. The fitness instructor that was mashed into a paste fine enough to spread on my favorite Wasa wafers had no drugs in his system, not even much adrenaline.”

  “That means he barely had time to react to what was going on. It just happened too fast,” she said, without missing a beat with the knife and fork.

  “Subsequent computer analysis demonstrated that to obliterate a human body to the point where the blood and guts were nothing more than an indistinguishable goo, to say nothing of the bones, which require far more pressure to compact to dust, all without leaving any marks on the matting or indentations in the subflooring is impossible for a robot or a human.” Torin was doing just fine coordinating his eating and talking too, Kendra noticed, and was keeping pace with her despite the fact that he was doing most of the jawing about the case.

  She looked up from the food just long enough to notice that the adjoining tables were emptying. “We’re being inappropriate again.”

  “How so?”

  “It appears not everyone can handle autopsy reports with dinner.”

  “Not to worry, it’s all part of the master plan.”

  “What master plan?”

  “I advised the maître d’ that I’d buy up the seats as rapidly as they emptied. Before the evening is out we’ll have the entire place to ourselves for an even grander romantic gesture.”

  “You do think of everything. Maybe you should have been the investigator.”

  “And rob you of the chance to bottom out, seeing nothing but the worst in people? There’s no hope for you until you hit the southernmost point of that gravity well.”

  She smiled despite herself. “You mean there’s no hope for you.”

  “Touché.”

  “I appreciate you being transparent. No one else in my life is. It’s refreshing.”

  “I do what I can,” he said, smiling. Only he could smile with a mouthful of food without anything showing stuck between his teeth. The man was grace under pressure, far more pressure than she could apply, which made her wonder why she kept trying.

  “What’s your explanation for the zero-indentations to the floor thing?”

  “A magnetically charged plate in the floor of opposite charge to the metal in the barbell could have done it, assuming the discs and bar were also magnetically charged. Neither was the case in this instance.”

  “So if it’s not a robot or a person,” she said, trying to steer the conversation to some quick but useful end, “what is it?”

  “A psychic.”

  “Like you?”

  “No, definitely not like me. This one is telekinetic, for whatever else he or she is. Would explain her putting an energy shield beneath the man to avoid bringing the building down on their heads from the earth tremors she’d have generated with that much force.”

  “A psychic that powerful? There’s been no such thing ever recorded.”

  “Yes, well, that does bode better for some device being involved, but my intuition says differently.”

  She sighed. “I miss the days when I could just dismiss you as entirely ridiculous. As it is, I can’t turn around without hearing about some breakthrough at some lab. Half the time it isn’t even some well-funded operation; it’s a guy working out of his garage with a home biology kit and some DNA samples that are barely pricier than the one I didn’t get as a child, which, if I had gotten, I’d likely have become a coroner myself.”

  “You don’t envy me for my career or my extraordinary abilities. You envy me because I’m comfortable with being special and you’re not.”

  “Who says I’m
special?”

  “I do.”

  “Nonsense. Not even in a world without the human-enhanced walking around.”

  “You keep telling yourself that and you might just keep believing it.”

  She grew conscious of staring at him with her head tilted to the side, as if the left side of her brain was partaking in such heavy processing to make sense of what he was saying it was throwing her entire head off balance. “This is an old saw with you. You never would say what you found so special in me.”

  “It’s not for me to say. If I do, you’ll accuse me of planting the idea in your head and yourself as being highly susceptible to suggestion.”

  She grunted. “That’ll be the day.” Another legacy from dear old Dad. She had been too impressionable once. Never again. Perhaps that was why she was forever forced to listen to Torin’s preposterous suggestions, to force her to learn to trust again, in magic, in miracles, in wonder, in anything she couldn’t understand far less explain.

  She continued with her eating, hoping the comfort food would return her to her safe place, her feel-good place, de-stressing her enough to help her see clearly. “All right, assuming there is something to this psychic theory of yours, what’s his motive for beating up an anonymous guy to such an extent, when simply killing him would suffice to silence anything he witnessed? I checked into our fitness instructor. Complete loner. Lived to work out. Probably because he had more issues than you and I put together. You don’t get involved with people, you don’t get under anyone’s skin enough for them to want to do you in—not like that.”

  “Most people who display telekinetic abilities who aren’t among the enhanced have little control of it. Dishes flying across the room and breaking when they get unduly frightened or angry. That kind of thing. Quick outbursts. Nothing sustained.”