Washington, D.C.
October 15th
I looked at the ring in my hand. “I don’t want this,” I said.
“You’ll need it,” he said. “If you’re going to have any chance of keeping the human race alive, you’ll need that ring.”
“I can’t use it,” I said. “I don’t know how.”
“You’ll learn fast, I suspect,” he said. “You’ll have some advantages. My randomization program – the one you call the obfuscator – will still run, giving you some breathing space. It should last for a while, and maybe you’ll be able to figure out how to set up another one in time. I think the ring will flag you as a Core member, so the Core won’t be able to use the Overnet directly against you, not unless you do something stupid and the Guidelines are revoked. If you do anything with any substantial power, your location will be broadcast, so be careful. You’ll probably only have to worry about the three Core members in the North America faction, the others will probably stand back and hope that you’re screw them up. Most of all, beware the person that was our pilot – he is the most deadly and ruthless of any of them.”
I just continued to look at the silver circle in my hand, not understanding. “Why? I don’t understand. Why are you giving this to me?”
He sighed. “I’m tired… and I’m able to convince myself, just enough, that you’re the key to this all. You’re a random factor, the wild card, and I’m not sure what your Monitor was planning, but I think that no one would expect me to do what I’ve just done, and I think that you actually have a chance. They won’t know what to expect from a human, and you have some innate talents that may develop in time to save you, and… I don’t know. You might be able to force their plans to change. You have a chance of saving the human race, and it’s a good enough chance… I think that it’s good enough… that I can transfer this albatross of a geas to you, and now I can finally take a rest.”
“Please… don’t,” I said. “You could do so much for us.”
“You have the responsibility now,” he said. “I’m too tired to really fight effectively, not for a race that isn’t my own. I’ve done my time, seen enough of the universe. I’m done.”
It has always been a tenet of mine that intelligent beings should be allowed to choose the manner of their end, whether peacefully in bed or by violent suicide in the middle of the night, and I could do no less for him. “Okay. I wish it were different.”
He said, “When you’re as old as I am, you’ll understand. You should leave now.”
We shook hands one more time, and I went out of the museum, back to my car, and then drove back to the hotel. While I drove, I thought that I could feel the obfuscation field, like some secure comforter, hiding my location. I didn’t feel like going back into the room, so I just walked around until I found a small park, picked a bench in the sun, and sat down. I looked at the auras of the people that walked by, and they were amazingly clear and vivid, and I wanted to do something but instead I just expanded my perceptions… I imagined slowly floating upwards. I could see park below, and then the houses surrounding it, but as I started looking at the houses more closely it was as if something suddenly came from the outside and grabbed onto the image in my mind and gave it sharpness and reality that it didn't have before. It was if the internal theater of my mind has been covered with vaseline, and suddenly someone came in and wiped it off and replaced it with a 54" high-definition color television. I could see exactly what the landscape looked like; I could move up and down at will; and I knew it all was accurate with a cold certainty. It was like the most fantastic, amazing, stereophonic drug experience in the world. Without the drugs.
I experimented, then, skipped around the limits of perception. I knew that I could zoom into the houses, see through walls, walk through and count the number of people within. I wanted to see which houses had somebody in them, so I visualized a layer, labeled it “Humans,” put it on top of the image that I saw in my mind’s eye; and saw small figures walking around, superimposed somehow on the satellite view that I had.
I experimented with the layers, took away the satellite view to watch the people below go about their lives on a flat, featureless plain; zoomed up, and could see the rough outlines of the United States, with the East and West coasts in relatively sharp detail due to the number of people, both neighboring a rather fuzzy and indistinct middle America. God, I thought, this is like playing with the paint program for the universe. And it was, actually, and now that I thought about it, it was worth approaching it from that metaphor. I flipped off the view of the terrain saw just the people below; now I added a mask layer, filtering it to just... oh, say... only people over 30. Instantly the view below me changed, reduced to the mask that I had specified.
For an hour after that I just sat in the park and played, the world being my own personal game program. I appeared in Hawaii and dived into an active volcano, watching the bubbling hot lava as I pretended to stand on it; I changed my viewpoint, held the Earth at arms length like a beach ball, and traced that same magma into the core by just feeling the heat from it with my finger. I went to Japan, roamed about in the streets of Tokyo, looked at the shops and watched people cramming into the subways and smelled the fish in the markets, submerged my hand into boiling water and touched a lobster. I submerged myself off the coast of Mexico, went to the bottom and walked along and saw the strange fish swimming in the water around me, then went up to the surface and found some dolphins and watched them play. I sat on a beach in South France and contemplated the tide coming in while my bare feet dug into the sand, the moon high above. I went to a pond near my house and looked at the bacteria congregating within; I looked closer and closer until the bacteria was the size of a dining room table, to where I could see the cilia moving like strange fingers. I visited a hundred places on this earth, all different, and with everyone I looked at in ways both common and uncommon to man. This was what it must be like to be a god...
I was literally panting, amazed at what I had just done. “Oh my god, what a rush!”
More than ever, I wanted to fly, stop water, move mountains, use the powers. I didn’t just want to watch, like some demigod voyeur, I wanted to change the world. But I held back.
I stopped then, taking a rest, and decided that I wanted something to eat. I got up from the bench and took a lazy stroll towards the downtown, looking for someplace where I could get some reasonable facsimile of a ham sandwich. I walked with in a crowd of four or five others, all seemingly lunch hunters from the local offices, and we all stopped at a crosswalk as we waited for the crosswalk light to turn from red to green. We had just missed the cycle, apparently, because the large yellow schoolbus in front of us, filled with children peering out the windows, started moving into the intersection… and:
… just in my peripheral vision, I could see a blue Mustang running the red light, accelerating through the intersection…
… and standing there, I instantly clicked into the Overnet, and time slowed as I saw the cars as collections of vectors and speeds…
… saw the vectors for the bus and the Mustang intersect, brought up a layer for tensile strength of metals, cross overlayed with passenger positions, and saw red Xs over the likely fatalities and injuries as a result of the vector intersection that was just now taking place…
… and I knew that I shouldn’t use my powers, that the death of six children and crippling of two others was not worth the risk of trying to help them, not with the Core so close…
… but the tingling in my skin would not be denied, and I wanted to use those powers, oh so much wanted to use those powers, and a moral excuse was as good as anything else, so without a second thought I threw myself into the right of frame of mind, and I was in my three-dimensional memory matrix again, saw everything as a collection of live objects, and with just a tweak or two in the right locations I directed the force of the impact down and into the ground, away from the cars, so when the cars actually hit there was a foomp more than a crash, and the bus continued to go along its course and the driver of the blue Mustang looked mystified, as if he couldn’t understand what had gone on…
… and all the energy from the crash was redirected to the ground, forming this huge crack in the asphalt…
… so I decided to fix the asphalt, really quickly, and all it took was a quick temperature increase (oh, add this over here to make sure that the heat doesn’t affect anything else, and add a routine in this location so that no one sees the light from the repairs), and then smoothed over the asphalt and fixed it and that was that…
… except as I came down from my Overnet high I knew that I had flared brightly, sent out a warning to anyone that was watching, and if the Core were at all close I was very much in trouble.
Monitor started clicking, at that point, but I just ignored it. After a while, it stopped.
I walked away from the chaos in the intersection, then, and because I needed something to dull the desire that was racing through my body I picked a likely looking bar, went in, and ordered a screwdriver. I downed it in seconds and then ordered another one. As the alcohol started to hit my bloodstream and seep into my brain, it slowed down my thinking and gradually reduced the desire to use the Overnet. I was afraid that I had attracted their notice, and it made it worse that I didn’t know their detection range or capabilities, because instead of well-reasoned fear there was instead this general dread and paranoia that colored my thoughts. I wanted to tap into the Overnet, check around, and look to see if the Core was nearby, but I was afraid even to do that, because I didn’t know if the Core were 100 yards or 100 miles away at the moment.
I moved to another seat at the bar, one that left me with my back to a wall and watching the doorway; the bartender looked at me a little oddly but didn’t say anything. I watched him at work, talking with the other few patrons that were in there at the time. He was constantly moving: if he wasn’t pulling a drink for someone, then he was putting dishes into the dishwasher, or taking them out of the dishwasher and putting them in the glass racks that hung above his head, or he was tidying up the vast multicolored array of bottles that sat behind him.
Despite my fear of the Core and the underlying dread that they were only feet away, I still wanted to experiment, to try and do things, even small things. I considered heating my drinks, or making one of the glasses fall down, or moving the bottles, or changing every molecule in the seat below me to gold. I could do any of that, possibly, and I just needed to experiment.
A woman sat down near me, about two seats away. She was incredibly beautiful, and a little incongruous in that time and place, a diamond in a dime store. She was thin, not curvy, but with the most brilliant green eyes nicely framing a small pert nose, and she had hair that cascaded down her back and drew the eye along the long, straight lines towards her legs. She was wearing a long blue dress, absolutely business appropriate, but somehow the way that she wore it made it seem the same as lingerie.
She looked at me, and then looked away, and something about the power that I felt I had at my disposal made act differently. It was as if I was in a dream, just watching myself talk.. “Hello,” I said.
She looked back at me, smiled briefly, and then her face returned to its previous impassive state. “Hi.” She looked into her drink.
“I have to know your name,” I said, urging her.
“Charity.”
“My name is Peter. It’s very nice to meet you, Charity. I won’t make any of the obvious jokes, either.”
She rolled her eyes. “I do appreciate that, actually. Are you a local? I’ve never seen you before.”
“No, I’m just visiting for a while,” I said. “Seeing the sights.”
“See anything worth mentioning?”
“Just now,” I said, and she smiled at that.
Something about her just caused me to tremble, and I was getting more excited than I had been a long time. She made Gwen look like a hag, by the simple expedient of sitting there and holding her drink just so, and I knew that I wanted her, and any moral compunctions or ethical considerations were tossed out the door immediately. I started speaking, and I didn’t know who was really talking, because it certainly wasn’t me.
“You know, I think, more than anything else, that I really need to take you to bed…” and I kept reading her body language, she was on, she was interested and reacting favorably, but she said huffed, and said: “Do you really think I’m that type of person?” I ignored her words, though, just looked at her, and said, “I think for the right type of guy that you would be that type of girl,” and as I said that I was thinking, “What the hell am I saying?”
I don’t remember what happened in the next three minutes, but I do remember walking back to my motel room with her, touching her possessively on the hips and arm, the way that she would move closer to me when I did so, and it was all I could do control myself for the five minute walk back to the motel, and I kissed her every time that we had to stop to wait for the crosswalk light.
We finally made it back to my motel room. I opened the door and held it open for her, and as she walked in she ran her finger up the length of my pants, and it was obvious what I wanted and what she wanted and I was unbuttoning my shirt while she had somehow shrugged out of her dress, revealing a lacey camisole underneath, and my pants were vibrating, what was that? I realized that it was my phone, and it was distracting me, so while Charity lay down on the bed and started stretching seductively, I pulled my phone out of my pants and hit the button to shut it up and then looked at the caller ID and it was Gwen.
The strength of my lust decreased slightly, a little, as I thought about Gwen, and really, there was no way that Gwen could compare to the woman before me…
… so I moved to turn off the phone, and then imagined that Gwen was in a life threatening emergency and needed help, and I wouldn’t want her to be hurt, even given what she had done to me…
… so I smiled at Charity, said, “Let me just take this for a second, and then I’m all yours,” and answered the phone.
“Yes.” I said.
“Oh, Peter, oh, thank god. Look, this is Gwen.”
“I know. What do you want?”
“Peter, I’ve been thinking. A lot, lately. You know, I need to talk with you.”
It was cruel of me, perhaps, but a part of me couldn’t resist using the line she had used on me not weeks earlier. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Please, Peter, there is. I made a mistake. A horrible mistake. Please, can’t we talk about it? The more I think about it, the more I realize that I want to be with you… I miss you so much… please, Peter, can we meet?” She started to cry.
“I’m not even in the area.”
“Please, Peter. I’m begging.”
I looked at Charity, lying on the bed, so ready and close. Who was Gwen’s friend, anyway? The one that she spent so much time with, and that she was so mysterious about? Really, turnabout was fair play, it didn’t matter, I wanted Charity more than anything else in the world right now. “Gwen, we can meet later. Not today. I’m busy, I will talk to you later.”
“Peter!” she said as I hung up.
I turned off the phone. Charity looked at me.
“Take it all off,” she said. “I want you nude and me clothed.”
“Interesting,” I said, but I took off my socks and started to undo my belt, and quickly my pants and underwear were on the floor, and I stood before her, and I knew that she was very turned on.
“The ring, too, take that off, I hate jewelry on men. Is that an engagement ring?”
I looked at it, confused by her sudden change of direction, “No, of course not, I just wear it.”
She held out her hand, said, “Let’s see.”
I shrugged, said, “Sure, one sec,” picked up my pants and went to place them on the dresser, and as I did so I saw her keys on the dresser, and they had a keychain with the initials RKH. I stopped for a second.
“I thought your name was Charity?” I said.
“That just the name I use when I pick up men in a bar,” she said. “My real name is Roberta.”
It was understandable, I believed her, and she was so innocent… but something about the way that she said that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, because Roberta instead of Charity was, somehow, much more menacing, so despite my fears about the Core, I stood there nude in a motel room while I called up the Overnet and flipped to a map of the United States and put on a layer for the Core, wondering while I was doing that why hadn’t I done this before.
I saw a pair of horns on the West Coast, and I knew immediately that was the one that Leonardo had warned me about, the pilot, and I called him Demon;
I saw a jester’s mask in the Midwest, hiding a much weaker but sneakily obscure presence, and I imagined it laughing at all of my machinations, and I called him Snide;
And then a rose, centered on my location, cool strength under gentle waters, and I called her Serene.
I zoomed in, zoomed in again, finally just opened my eyes and looked at her, and with the extra senses granted to me I could see she was Serene.
She immediately knew what I was doing, could tell what I was seeing. “Oh, poo. Does this mean I don’t get to have my fun?”
“God!” I yelled as I did the first thing I could reflexively think of, which was to use the Overnet to eject myself backwards at high speed, and as I plunged through the wall I realized that I was still undressed and had only a pair of pants in my hand, which was going to be embarrassing but at any rate that was far better than being dead. I could feel the attention from Demon and Snide and Serene, and she was already pursuing me and locking down my location as I fell to the ground. I broke my fall with a quick momentum dispersion and then looked all the very astonished businessmen and women and tourists and children as they looked at the nude man that had plunged into their midst from the sky.
There was an open manhole cover nearby, so I jumped down it, put on my pants quickly, started running as quickly as possible, sharp anonymous objects in the water puncturing my feet as I ran. I used the Overnet to allow me to see within the dark tunnels, and I could feel Serene coming down to the ground, trying to pursue me, but I had resolved to not do anything that was going to allow her to track me. I took a branch, took another branch, and eventually the exponential branching meant that she couldn’t track me down. I could feel her malevolent presence in the area as I ran to get away.
Finally, an hour later, I peeked out and saw a clothesline with clothes, and I acquired a shirt and socks and after some work bootstrapped myself into normality with the application of some cash at a local strip mall. I went to a different hotel, paid cash for a room, and purchased a airline ticket home. I didn’t know how long it was going to take them to track me down, but I was afraid.