Strangers and Shadows (28 page)

Laughter spewed forth from Julia’s lips.  “Come now,
husband
, you can’t be serious…”   She went to the window and stared out.  “I’m giving our daughter a wonderful gift—the same I’ll give to you and eventually your people.”

“What gift is that?”

“Do you think I would harm Celia?”

“I wouldn’t put anything past you these days, Jules,” Desmond said with a hint of sadness around his eyes.

“Do you know why I left you, Desmond?” Julia asked.  “Did you ever manage to figure that one out?”

Desmond was silent.

“It was because one day, I realized that I would never be able to have the kind of connection that you and Celia had.  You were such an amazing man, with talents I could only ever dream of—super powers.  I couldn’t stay and be content, knowing that I would never be your equal in our relationship.”

“But we had love, Julia.  That’s all we could ever need.”

“You say that now, with the way things have gone, but if I’d have stayed, you would have grown tired or bored with me.  Now, though, our peoples are almost equals.  Now, we will not have to play second fiddle to your powers.  We will be one race, living under one law.”

A tear streaked down Desmond’s face.  “What have you done, Julia?”

“Come, I will show you my designs for the MultiVerse.”

Julia led Desmond out of the inner chamber, through her office, and back into the maze of halls that made up the Embassy.  The young woman, Ava, followed from a distance, along with a small contingent of armed guards.

“I assure you, Desmond, no harm will come to our daughter…  She will just be made normal, as the rest of us are.”  

“There was nothing unnatural about her to begin with,” Desmond said.

“Nothing unnatural?  You call superpowers natural?” 

“Every human has the potential for them, so, yes, I call them natural.  Nothing, aside from being born, has ever been done to Celia or any of my people for these abilities to be made manifest.  We simply live as we were created to live—”

“So you claim, Desmond.”

“You lived among us, Julia!  How can you not see the difference in our two cultures?”

“That’s what’s wrong,” she said. “The differences are too great.  Our peoples must be made one.”

“All we’ve ever wanted was peace between our two
v
erses, Julia…  It was
your
verse that pulled away from
us
.”

“No!  You will not lay the blame for this on us, Desmond.  I won’t allow it!  This began when your people shamed our use of the nanites.  You couldn’t stand that we had developed our own version of your telepathic abilities.  Tell me, how could we not pull away from that kind of rejection?”

“Shamed is a very strong word for our reaction.  We only ever warned about the danger of the nanites.  You are well aware of the ease with which they can overtake a person if their programming were to be damaged or influenced.”

“No more so than your ability to mind control others!” Julia defended.  “We’ve made leaps and bounds in the technology since I first left you and Celia.”

They had arrived at one of the many observation rooms that the Embassy held.  It was stationed high above the large room that it overlooked.  Through the sizable viewing window, Desmond could see a ring with a diameter of about fifteen feet or so.  The ring sat in the center of the room.  There was a bundle of cables running from the ring to a clear glass chamber.  The chamber was empty.  The cables connected at the uppermost corners of the chamber.

“This is the beginning, Desmond,” Julia motioned at the ring.  “This is what will bring us all together.  First the Sixth Verse, and then in time, when they’re a bit older, the rest.”

“What exactly am I looking at?” Desmond asked.  He was nervous.  Whatever Julia had planned, he had a bad feeling about it.

“The Portal Ring, or PR, as we like to call it…” she giggled.  “Is a little thing we had developed to solve the transportation problem we’ve been having with the EM fields.”  Julia appeared to be quite pleased with herself.  “With the EMF generators up and running, your people in the Sixth will not be able to stop us from deploying the nanites.”

“That’s what you did to Celia, isn’t it?”

“You’re finally getting it, Desmond,” Julia said.  “Unfortunately, the virus takes about a week to finish its transformation—longer in the more powerful cases, such as you and Celia, but we hope to improve that in time.”

“You really have lost it, haven’t you?”  Desmond realized that whatever part of himself that had held out hope for Julia had just given that hope up.  She was a stranger now, through and through.  He couldn’t recognize any part of her anymore.  It was as if someone had taken over her mind and body.

“
Lost what?
” Julia laughed.  “Desmond, we are on the verge of history.  Soon, all of humanity will be equals, and thanks to the Mother Brain Construct, even the problem of death will have been solved.”

“Not this again, Julia.  It all comes back to your parents, doesn’t it?”

Julia’s face twitched slightly as she looked down and away.  She said nothing.

“Julia, they’re gone, and there was nothing you could have done to prevent that.  You were in a different universe when the accident happened.”

“I know that!”  Julia was angry.  There was fire in her eyes.  “If the Mother Brain Construct had existed back then, then they wouldn’t have had to die.  They could have uploaded their consciousness and then waited for their bodies to be cloned.”

Desmond scoffed.  “And have you figured out how to provide bodies for all these disembodied souls?”

“We’re nearly there.  We have successfully transferred back and forth between the body and the Mother, so we know it’s possible.”

“Let me guess,” Desmond said.  “You’re having problems with the soul-less bodies dying on you…”

Julia looked unnerved for a moment.  “Yes, that’s right… How did you…?”  She shook her head and cleared her mind.  “I don’t know why I still get surprised when you do that.”  For a fleeting moment, she felt something resembling the feelings she once had for this man, but she didn’t have time to focus on that right now.  “Bring him in,” she said to the guards.

Two guards left and returned moments later with a boy.

“
Kid!
”  Desmond hadn’t expected to see him.  He appeared to be in fine health, if not slightly scared and bewildered.

“You’re the man from the restaurant
,
” Kid said.  He looked to his mother. “What’s he doing here?”

“He came to save your sister.”

“What did she need to be saved from?” Kid asked.

“You haven’t told him?” Desmond asked Julia.  

“I’ve told him everything—from who his family is, to the plans for our blessed future.”

“Mother says if I help out, then we can all be happy together forever,” Kid said flatly in monotone.

“What have you done to him?”  Desmond was worried.  Kid was acting more like a robot than a human being.  In fact, there didn’t seem to be anybody at home behind the boy’s eyes.  His face was like a blank slate.

“Kid, you may return to your play…” Julia said.  

The boy turned and left the room without uttering another word.  “To answer your question, I’ve merely set him free, Desmond.  No longer will he be subject to the programming of his genetics, he will have what every child in the future will have—a long life, connected to the rest of humanity, and when that life is over, he will be able to choose to live another if he wishes, or spend his time in the Mother if that pleases him more.”

“You injected him?”  Desmond was growing angrier by the moment.  “How dare you?  Who decided you were fit to make that decision for him?”

“The same
god
, or
whatever
, that made me fit to do this—”  She walked up to Desmond, pressed the pneumatic syringe to his neck and injected his body with the
EMF-nanites
.

Desmond’s eyes rolled back, and his body went limp as it immediately tried to fight off the infection.  As he lost consciousness, he could hear Julia saying something.  “Don’t worry, Desmo—”  And then all was dark.

The Prime Minister turned to the young woman behind her.  “Ava, I want you to take my husband down to the medical bay in the detention center.”  The young girl nodded, and Julia continued.  “No one is to see him without my say-so, is that clear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Ava said.  She turned and ordered several of the guards to pick up Desmond’s body and carry it down to the infirmary.  

Ava walked at a leisurely pace.  She had time to look out the windows in the hallways.  Outside it was a beautiful, sunny day.  The sky was blue with just a few clouds in it.  It reminded her of New Britain in the summertime, with the exception of the hovers that flew every which way.

Thoughts of home made her wonder how her mother was.  No doubt she was busy getting things back to normal.  Lady White said she had taken care of the darkness. 
Mother would have her hands full, it was good that Asher had gone back, the queen would have need of his help.

She tried to push the thought of Asher out of her mind as quickly as it came in, but she found it difficult this time.  It wasn’t that she didn’t love him, she still did, she supposed.  She just couldn’t be with him though, he was part of the past now.  There was no room for him in this life.  Besides, she had moved on… several times.  She blushed at the memories. 
Asher would move on too.
 
It was best this way
, she told herself.

By the time they got to the medical bay, Ava’s thoughts were back in the present and wondering what part
Desmond
played in all of this.  She knew he was Lady White’s husband and Kid and Celia’s father.  What she couldn’t figure out was why the two hadn’t gotten divorced yet.  If it was her, she’d have made that a priority.  Maybe they did divorces differently in their verses.

The guards laid Desmond down on the bed, and went to their posts outside the door.  Ava took a seat next to the bed and propped her feet up, flipping through the net mags on her nano-link.  There was so much she still had to learn about her new home.

Surprise...

Dorian Wallace couldn’t have been more pissed off.  Not only had his harebrained father defected to the Sixth, but now, Dorian had to find him and find out how much he knew about their plans.

His father was a smart man, maybe the smartest Dorian had ever known, aside from himself, of course.  The thought brought a smile to his face.  No, there was only one place in the MultiVerse where Dorian could be sure his father would be found—his house.  He would never be able to leave all his precious treasure behind.

For years, ever since Dorian was little, his father had been taking trips to the Third.  Each time, he would return with some worthless trinket or piece of ancient technology.  Once, he had brought back something called a Nintendo.  His father had played with it for three days straight before taking it apart and putting it back together again.  It never worked the same way twice.

Other trips he brought back old hand guns.  He said they were from something called World War Two.  Another glance around his father’s house revealed a host of other trinkets and treasures from days gone by—paintings, electronics, magazines, and books on a variety of subjects.  His favorite subject was history, Dorian remembered.  His father would sit for hours and read the histories of all the seven known verses.

As the days turned into weeks, Dorian grew more upset with every reminder of why he was where he was.

Finally, his patience was rewarded.  The noise came from his father’s storage shed out behind the house.  Not that it was a shed at all.  It was as nice as any of the buildings in the Seventh, but for some reason his father insisted on calling it a shed.  Dorian guessed it gave him some sort of connection with the people that he collected from in the less well off verses.

Dorian quietly exited his father’s house and weaved his way through the landscaping of his father’s yard.  He could see Wizard rummaging around through the shed’s windows.  His father had laid out a large blanket on top of the workbench and was busy gathering an assortment of
gadgets
which he piled on top of the blanket.

Dorian watched in amusement for a several minutes as his father flitted about like a bee gathering nectar from a flower bed.  

Dorian knew his father could be extremely stubborn, and more might be learned by observing what he was after, rather than trying to interrogate him.  Still, he needed to be sure that his father didn’t jump back out of the Seventh before
Dorian could question him
.

As Dorian deliberated on how long to let his father continue, Wizard forced his hand, pulling his jump-key out of his pocket.  Dorian pulled his pistol from its holster and
threw the door open
.