Time Bandits Read online

  “Strange. I had him figured more for the religious fanatic type,” Torin said, scratching his stubble. “You know, objecting vehemently to mankind taking charge of its evolution with upgrade technologies. Usurping the place of God and all that.”

  Acretia stopped dead in her tracks and turned to face them. “That’s exactly how he feels. And in his mind, he’s the only one who can remedy the situation by knowing what God truly intends for mankind.”

  “The path to hell is paved by those who would build utopia,” Kendra said.

  “I suspect you might be right,” Acretia remarked, resuming her walk. “If higher consciousness doesn’t evolve in tandem with more empowering technologies, all we’ll do is destroy ourselves all the faster with the scientific breakthroughs.”

  “So why aren’t you putting more energy into stopping him?” Kendra asked.

  “Because for the most part the emerging technologies are driving the higher consciousness needed to wield them. Now that most of the money to be made is focused on human upgrades, along with upgrading every other sentient lifeform, artificial or biological, along with the lifeforms that aren’t sentient. As it turns out, the only way to keep people competitive in this economy is to help them to be more who they are.

  “Yeah, sure, being smarter is part of it, but a relatively small part. It’s the creativity that accompanies people doing what they love most and throwing themselves at the tasks as if they were on a mission from God that’s the real engine driving Singularity.”

  “The exponential then post-exponential rate of technological growth,” Torin interjected.

  “Viewed narrowly,” Acretia said. “You’re also looking at an economy spiking in the same manner, you’re looking at all of humanity migrating out of conventional space-time, slipping in and out of parallel universes as we’re doing here. And that’s just for starters. Over time, we’ll have the combined mind power to create entirely new universes for ourselves. Collectively at first. But who knows, with time, perhaps individually as well.”

  “So, as far as you’re concerned, Clyde Barker’s project to rescue humanity is going to happen with or without him?” Kendra said.

  “And now you understand why we’re not particularly vested in running him to ground. There’ll always be people like him trying to throw a pipe-wrench into things. Either for all the wrong reasons or all the right ones. True, his intentions aren’t as pure as some. And intentions matter, as every thought we have reverberates forever and influences everyone else. That’s why it’s important to marshal our thoughts, develop some sort of mental hygiene. We’re all co-creating reality now, whether we want to accept that responsibility or not. And we all have a big and small role to play.”

  “So what you’re advocating is that we do nothing?” Kendra said.

  “Hardly. Just that we have our role to play and you have yours. I wish you all the best chasing him down. But if and when you catch up to him know that it will be at the appointed time set by the Godhead, not by you, as She plays both of you off each other to higher purposes neither of you can divine. That none of us can ultimately divine. So by all means, follow your heart, do what you believe is right, do what’s in your nature, just do so humbly and with the realization that only so much is in your hands.”

  Acretia walked on, quickly outpacing them. “Why do I feel like the interview is over?” Kendra said.

  “Well, I for one, fully intend to make the most of my stay on this spaceship.” Torin took her by the arm and led her through the nearest doorway.

  They found themselves outside on terra firma, back where they started before they stepped inside the nondescript building. This time when Torin tried the door to the building’s interiors it wouldn’t open for him. “Charming. Is it me or is this place every bit as sentient as the people working the land?”

  “You feel disappointed all you want. I for one am only now starting to breathe again. I’ll breathe even easier the instant we step off this power spot. The rides at Disneyland are racy enough for me.”

  Torin smiled. “You’re such a metaphysical lightweight.”

  They found their way to the edge of the commune the same way they found their way out of the maze, disagreeing each step of the way, but with Torin ultimately surrendering to Kendra’s lead, if only to salvage her fragile state of mind. As they meandered to the edge of the compound, Torin’s chatter didn’t diminish much. Perhaps intended to settle his nerves as much as hers. “Something tells me Clyde Barker didn’t achieve all this by simply accessing a planetary power spot. He must have used his fluency in nano-tech and a dozen other sciences to enhance a person’s connection to their energy body. Doing so would invite more chi energy to flow through the physical body. It’s through the energy body that we’re connected to everything else in the multiverse.”

  “You think that’s what he did with his protégé?”

  “Yes,” Torin said, “but she was no mere human to begin with. More of a cyborg, or human-A.I. hybrid. Explaining why even these upgraded humans can’t match what she can do.”

  It wasn’t until they were back in their rent-a-car from the airport, well beyond the boundary of the energy dome sheltering the commune, that she decompressed fully. She sighed and leaned her head against the steering wheel. “We should have stayed,” he said. “It was our best way of finding Clyde Barker and the girl.”

  “Yeah, well, I suggest we find a better way, because my coping mechanisms just aren’t up to that place.”

  “For what it’s worth, I don’t think mine are either.”

  “You could have fooled me.”

  “No doubt I fooled myself for the time we were there. Now that I’m back in the car and every cell in my body is tingling, I’d say I’m not holding up all that much better.” He flexed and relaxed his fingers a few times, feeling the circulation returning to his hands, but the tingling refused to abate.

  Kendra turned the ignition, put the car in gear, and drove off. From the way she depressed the accelerator, she would have thought she’d never driven before. Torin rubbed the back of his neck from the whiplash she gave him.

  Once the car settled onto the freeway and into a steady ninety-mile-an-hour pace, she found her head clearing. He must have been thinking better himself as his mouth was moving again. “One way or another,” he said, “we’re going to have to bring our minds up to speed. We can take it slow and easy if you like, especially as we seem to have all the time in the world, literally, and all the timelines. Or we can try and go in fast and hard. But one way or another, we have to bring our minds up to his level if we’re ever to rescue the girl from him. To say nothing of all of creation. And we won’t be doing it with any power site to help us. That should be quite the trick.”

  “What makes you think it’s our mission in life to rescue that girl?”

  “Maybe not mine, but definitely yours.”

  She glared at him defiantly but with a look of understanding she couldn’t hide from him or herself.

  “And I go where you go,” he said. “My destiny lies with you.”

  “I think I’ll settle back into my everyday police work, if you don’t mind. Put any idea of this case out of my head. Leave it for the more psychically endowed to pursue. I’m just a small town girl from a small town world with a small town attitude about the nature of reality and what I expect from my very ordinary, sometimes boring world. Boring is starting to look better by the minute given the alternatives.”

  “You can’t run from your destiny forever, and we both know it lies with that girl.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s an injured young girl inside of you that needs healing, and I don’t think it can until you can heal her. It’s enlightenment by proxy. For some of us it’s the only way.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I’ve never heard you swear before. Must have hit a nerve for sure.”

  She just glowered at the road ahead, and gripped the steering wheel, white-knuckled. Torin di
dn’t push the point further. He knew she was more a stewer than a deliberator in the final analysis. She didn’t mind talking things out to further a case, but when it came to that claptrap of a mind of hers, she needed to stew. Had always been that way as long as she could remember. Probably because her various layers of consciousness were cut off from one another, secondary to the childhood trauma she’d suffered. So without the internal meltdown to blur the boundaries, the insights trapped at one level of her mind would never find their way to another level.

  He would let her stall and go through her period of denial. Just part of the two-step they did together, as much a part of their investigative styles as their relationship. Just as well. He could use the time to figure out how in the hell they were going to track a man of the multiverse, as home everywhere as nowhere, across parallel timelines, even if they were both inclined to go chase after him.

  TWELVE

  Kendra stepped into their squad’s section of the police precinct, and plopped her purse down on the chair by her desk usually reserved for visitors. “So how are you guys coming on the case from your end?” Davenport asked. She was used to him tossing verbal salvos from his island of a desk onto her island across the sea of hardwood floor between them, perhaps more of a narrow inlet than a sea.

  “We’re not. In fact I’ll consider it a kindness if you never mentioned the case again.”

  Davenport bit his lip. “Maybe you’d like to take a gander at something more mundane.” He grabbed an orange out of the fruit bowl he kept on his desk and started peeling it.

  “I knew I liked you for a reason.”

  “Hey, for the record, you don’t hold a license on present shock, or present burnout, for that matter, present hate and resentment. Hell, I belong to most of the support groups.”

  “How’s that working out?”

  “They have an all-immersive holo game for luddites, I can recommend. The groups, not so much.”

  She collapsed into her chair, sinking into it as if it were a recliner instead of an inflexible, solid wood swivel. A chicken flew onto Davenport’s desk, started pecking on the keyboard. Davenport turned the monitor towards her. “Do you believe this?”

  Kendra watched the chicken type out, “I think therefore I am,” before clucking and flying off the desk onto the ground. “Okay, what gives?”

  “Speaking of Present Shock coping strategies, this one’s Willimino’s. I’m not sure I’m into the whole farm animals thing. Though he seems to go in for the zoo animals too,” Davenport said, as a squirrel monkey jumped on his shoulder. It took the orange segment offered him from the orange Davenport was preparing for his mouth.

  Some tropical bird jumped on her desk and started doing its bizarre mating dance to attract a female of its kind; it was quite the display and had her laughing. “They’re robots?”

  “Of course. You don’t think I’d agree to babysit them if they pooped and pissed on the floor, do you?”

  She watched no less than three more tropical birds go through their mating dances next as they flew out of the dark recesses of the office to take up a perch near a biolum lamp. She offered up one of her barely detectible straight lipped smiles in lieu of tossing coins in a hat for them. “Who is Willimino, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “One of your detectives.”

  “No shit. I gather he does well with minimal supervision.”

  “He’s in the hospital. So, not that well. They say he’ll pull through. I guess the birds were driving one of the neighbors up a tree, no pun intended.”

  The latest colorful tropical bird to do a dance jumped up on the edge of her desk and skitted from one side to the other, doing a kind of moon walk. “His neighbor should get a sense of humor. I’m sure you can purchase one at the local minimart.”

  “Costs a fortune, though, and they’re always out.” He held up his hands at her defensively in response to the look she was giving him. “Me and Superman do not lie.”

  She did her best to put the ever-swelling menagerie out of her mind. “So what have you got for me?”

  Davenport rotated on his chair and picked a pile of files off of his desk. She laughed. “Pen and paper, Davenport?”

  “Hey, you got your coping mechanisms, Willimino’s got his, and I got mine. One time, I walked counterclockwise around my coffee table and chanted ‘backward in time, ever backwards,’ all night long. No shit. I read this New Age book about positive magic working in tandem with the earth’s rotations and negative magic working against it. So I figured I’d try the black magic first to see if I’d end up someplace with, you know, less of the future pressing in on me from every which direction.”

  She laughed. “How did that work out?”

  “My wife found me two days into the trance. Poured water and dog piss on me until I snapped out of it. Said I’d ruined the carpet anyway. Ever since then she’s wanted superman in bed. Says if I have that kind of endurance I have no excuse.”

  Kendra tried to stifle her chuckling by placing her hand to her mouth. “You’re just saying all that to make me feel better. I know because it makes no sense for a gay man to be married to a woman who just wants more.”

  “Smart like a fox, that is. You see, living in the past is all a state of mind. I live in the days where it was more fashionable to be in the closet, and people drove 1955 Cadillac convertibles. The wife plays along with the period appropriate costumes and values. Figures it’s that or lose me altogether. We’re this generation’s Amish.”

  “You’re so full of it.”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die.” He gestured accordingly. “Some detective, you are. You’ve known me how long? Do you ever see me stressing?”

  “No, come to think of it.”

  “It’s because I’ve got my alternate reality down better than a complete schizophrenic. Not one of those guys is more sold on their paranoid delusions than I’m sold on mine.”

  She could feel the crow’s feet deepening around her eyes with what she was doing to her mouth. “You’re completely ridiculous.”

  “There’s plenty of folks like us. Each couple living in a different slice of time. All sorts of communities you can join that just makes the delusion all the more real. Nothing like co-creating your reality with a bunch of like-minded folks.”

  “I just came from one of those places. Definitely not for me. Guess I’m going this alone,” she said sobering, her eyes going vacant as her mind got sucked down the drainage hole taking her back to the past, proving once and for all that time was liquid.

  “Hey! Snap out of it, Kendra. I’ll take the bitchy you over the distant you any day.”

  He was feeding the squirrel monkey on his shoulder another orange segment, when she came back into the moment. “So, who’s your male squeeze?” she said.

  He nodded to the captain. “No way!”

  “I’m Hispanic, mostly, he’s black. Most everyone else around here is Chinese or Vietnamese or Japanese, e-Z-going as the joke goes. So everyone just thinks we’re rendezvousing to lick our bruised egos. Well, they got the licking part right.”

  “I’m sorry we took over the world. We didn’t mean to. It just sort of happened.”

  “Hey, no excuses necessary. You had us beat on the numbers. The top ten percent of you guys, your best and brightest, outnumber our entire population. And, hell, no one in America wanted anything to do with science anyway. Couldn’t pay us enough to study it. So we had to import you guys to keep the economy going. Turns out the E-Zs are more enterprising all around. Guess it helps to be first generation and dirt poor to work like the dickens, even at jobs you hate. You get sort of sick of that in the more mature economies. Stop being able to fake it.”

  “Who says we’re faking?”

  “Then there’s that. There’s so many of you, they can look for the ones that love these ugly jobs. How do the rest of us compete with that?”

  “By sucking dick as if it were some pacifier, apparently.”

  Davenport lau
ghed. “That’s inappropriate, bigoted, and low. Glad to hear my girl’s back. For a while there I thought I’d have to send you to desensitization therapy so you could get up each morning and not give a damn like the rest of us.”

  “They have that?”

  “Oh, yeah. As PTSD groups go, that one is most in demand. I told you, you’re nothing special.”

  She grunted. “That’s not what Torin says.”

  “Ah, so now we’re getting down to it. That’s what’s really bothering you, isn’t it? The idea that you’ve been living a lie all along. The woman who’s dedicated her life to unearthing the truth. Would be a bit ironic, like a sick twist of fate. Fate being a twisted bitch, I fully support this theory. So who do you think you are, really?”

  “You’ve gone from being helpful to being a pain in the ass in a heartbeat, just like Torin. No wonder you like him.”

  “Hey, put another quarter in the meter if you want more period-appropriate sensitivity.”

  She gave him a wan smile, and watched as the sloth inched its way up the pole supporting the hats and jackets. A koala bear had already taken up a roost in one of the open branches at the top of “the tree.” Starting to resent the distractions, she said, “So what’s in those files?”

  Davenport slid the folders out of the way of the monitor. “Maybe a picture is worth a thousand words.” He turned the screen on his desk to face her, hit enter on his keyboard.

  “Oh my God!” she said. “Please tell me that’s state of the art special effects.”

  “You wish. Some are calling him Lizard Man, on account of the fact that that’s what he looks like. But Lizardo and Reptilio are climbing the polls fast as secondary monikers.”

  She watched the guy scamper up the side of the skyscraper on all fours like a giant gecko, firmly attached to the seemingly frictionless surface of the polished stone and windows. His tail swirled behind him as a counterweight to steady him against the undulating movements of his elongated spine. She shook her head hard enough to get her brain to rattle around inside; maybe a self-imposed concussion would make the image go away. No such luck. “What’s he even trying to do?”