Again, I scanned for cops, or anyone who looked suspicious. But everything appeared normal. Besides the average Joes, there was a hyperspaceball team, in full gear, in the waiting area. So was a marching band, which seemed to be deep in a heated discussion of which car to take.
I was next in line when the first Taser hit me. I watched the Tesla bolt streak through the air and zap the front of my do. Incongruously, it appeared to have been fired from a trombone. I managed to pull the men-the helmet-out of my suitcase and slap it over my head just as the bullets really began to fly.
Besides the full kendo armor I wore under my kimono, I’d also wound sheets of food preservative wrap around my arms and legs. In commercials, the plastic film boasted it was self-sealing and completely leak-proof. You couldn’t puncture it, no matter how hard you tried. I’d soon see if that guarantee included Taser needles.
The people around me toppled over, wax bullets zapping them right and left. Within three steps I’d been hit with more than a hundred Tasers, lighting me up like a Fourth of July firework. Both the hyperspaceball team and the marching band had been undercover cops, and much of their equipment and instruments were really Tasers in disguise.
Though it was getting impossible to see in the blinding blue electrical haze, I hadn’t actually felt a hit yet. The armor, and the food wrap, were keeping me safe, even though I was a walking Van de Graaff generator.
Then a bullet hit me in the hand-the only unprotected part of my body. Once the circuit was complete, the two hundred other Tesla bolts took the path of least resistance and entered my body through the hole. I folded like a bad poker hand, the pain spiking the meter somewhere between excruciating and unbearable. I could feel pressure in my eyeballs begin to build. The moisture in my mouth evaporated as my teeth began to glow.
I was going to die.
Unlike the many other times in the past twenty-four hours when I knew I was going to die, this one hurt the most. As I twitched on the ground, my only thought was to get it over with quickly because it was so agonizing.
Then, a moment later, all the pain was gone. The electricity had stopped.
I wondered if I’d passed out. Or died.
No-I was on my knees, still in the station. I blinked away the mote flashes and looked around. The marching band, and the sports team, were gone. So were the people in the immediate area who had dived for cover.
I heard gunfire, followed the sound, and saw four cops-this time dressed as cops-shooting in another direction. A moment later, they disappeared.
Or perhaps imploded would be a better term.
One errant musician-a tuba player-dropped his instrument and beelined toward the exit. He vanished in midstep.
My brain was still scrambled by the dose of electricity I’d received, but I managed to figure out what was going on.
Sata. He was here.
I managed to stand, turning around in an unsteady circle, trying to spot my mentor. I found him walking casually up to me. Strapped across his chest was something that looked like a TEV, but also different. It had a black shell, which reflected light like a prism. And there was some sort of lens in front. When Sata pressed a button, the lens flashed – forming a miniature black hole and sucking people into nothingness. I watched him implode a whole family-mother, father, two kids-who were hovering under a plastic table in the food court.
“Sata!”
He looked at me and smiled. Then he disappeared a group of grade-school kids.
I pulled off my helmet and ran over, or at least tried to. After two steps I fell onto my face. I tried crawling, but my limbs still weren’t working right. Three hundred million volts will do that to a guy.
But I needn’t have bothered going to Sata. He came to me, turning occasionally to implode anyone he passed.
“Stop,” I told him.
“Stop what? This?” He pressed the button, taking out a fat man who’d been unable to quite make it around the bend.
“Enough, Sata. Please.”
“But it’s so much fun, Talon. When I think of all the years I wasted trying to protect these moronic, useless fools. What a colossal waste of carbon our species has become.”
I got to my feet, though I was wobbly. “Is this what you did with Vicki? Sucked her into a black hole?”
“Actually, it’s not a black hole. It’s a wormhole. I’m not technically killing these people. These utopeons, along with the unfortunate denizens of Boise, were sent to a parallel earth on another eleventh-dimensional membrane.”
“So they’re not dead?”
“Not when I send them there. But I have no idea how long they’ll last once they arrive. They’re now on an earth where the Chicxulub asteroid never caused the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event and wiped out the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. I suspect most of the unfortunate wretches have become food for superintelligent T. rexes by now. It’s quite amazing how much the dinos have evolved. They might even be smarter than us.”
I didn’t want to ask, but I had to. “And Vicki?”
He shook his head, slowly. “Talon, Talon, Talon. I wouldn’t send her to that awful place. She’s safe in Wisconsin, with someone watching her. Someone you’ve come to know intimately well.”
“Where is she, Sata?”
Sata smiled. “She’s with you, of course.”
FORTY-FIVE
Words don’t normally fail me. But when I processed what Sata had said, and all it implied, I was speechless.
Vicki wasn’t with me. She was with that psycho Alter-Talon.
“Yes, he’s here,” Sata said. “Dimensional travel to parallel worlds. Extraordinary, isn’t it? We’re supposed to view this primitive Tower of Babel”-Sata swept his hands at the space elevator-“as mankind’s crowning achievement. The pinnacle of technology and human ingenuity. And for what purpose? So people can play volleyball and hump each other in zero gravity? But with this”-he patted the TEV-“I can travel to places beyond mere space. I can access an infinite amount of worlds, with an infinite amount of variation. If it can be imagined, it exists. And I can see it all.”
“How… could you?” I managed.
Sata frowned at me. “I assume you mean How could you send people to the man-eating dinosaur planet? instead of the far more compelling How could you accomplish this miracle of modern science? I’ll answer both. If you recall timecasting class, you know one of the many unique properties of tachyons, other than their ability to travel faster than the speed of light, is they have negative mass squared. Yet even with imaginary mass, they can decay to closed strings, which, in vibrational mode, can cause instability in spacetime itself. Can you even imagine?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t give two shits about the science. I just wanted him to keep talking until I was lucid enough to draw McGlade’s. 44 Magnum, which was wedged in my chest plate.
Sata continued, “When I developed the tachyon emission visualizer, my immediate success was focusing this instability on our ’brane, to record the past in our universe. But at the same time, the disruption of spacetime caused by the tachyons opened wormholes to infinite other membranes. I ignored them, because even though it was theoretically possible to tune in to those ’branes, I had no way of knowing which one I’d be on at a particular time. The vastness of infinity made the process entirely random. What I needed was a way to impose order on infinity. I needed… a search engine.”
“Aunt Zelda,” I said, slipping my hand inside my padding.
“Yes. Mister-or I suppose I should say Miss-Debont had perfected WYSIWYW search-engine technology with uffsee. But she had an even greater patent. One she never got to use. A way to compile relevant terms by metacrawling an infinite data source, using a geometric fractal algorithm. Anything that can happen, does happen, on some parallel earth. With her tech, and my tech, I could now search those infinite dimensions.”