I tried to point out the euthanasia shop to Travis, but he missed it.
“Super senses?” I asked, speaking softly and, turning away from the window to look at him.
Travis frowned for a moment. “Night vision,” he muttered. “Not this. Besides you’ve got the window seat.”
I smiled at him. “You were polite.”
He had been. He let me on the bus first.
Something about Bullet’s attitude rubbed me the wrong way, so I didn’t make a big effort to hurry. It didn’t matter. Half the people in front of us did.
Travis stood up before I even put my hand on the seat.
It didn’t allow either of us to exit the bus any faster—not with everyone getting up at the same time.
Eventually we did, and instead of being in a line waiting to get out of the bus, we stood next to the door, waiting to pick up our CDPS’s, split into groups, and step into an impossible place.
Why it took as long as it did, I have no idea. We’d been told which groups we were in before we’d even gotten on the bus. Plus it was cold. Standing on a grassy plain in the month of November isn’t something I’d recommend to anyone.
Grandma Vander Sloot told me about the city, how it existed simultaneously in an infinity of alternate dimensions, how an alley could lead you somewhere Kaiser Wilhelm and Germany won World War I, and you might meet the version of yourself that lived there.
She told me about the people imprisoned there, exiles from too many universes to name.
You’d think a place like that might put you in mind of Victorian Gothic novels—Wuthering Heights’ moors and ghosts, a decaying aristocracy, and their uneducated, superstitious servants.
If you did expect that, it would only be the first of a long list of disappointments. Continue reading Rachel in Infinity City: Part 1
Jaclyn paused, and then said, “What happens next?”
Flick said, “Well, then we have to decide whether we take them in as soon as we can, or whether we watch them, and hope they’ll lead us to other people the Nine hired.”
The tone of her voice turned sarcastic as she said, “But that’s not the best part. The best part is the committee monitoring how we do it, and second guessing whether watching him without taking him in is really worth it. Plus with this we’ll get to discuss at any moment whether what we do will cause an international incident.
“Look forward to it kids, this is what you’re training for.”
Text appeared below the screen that showed our position and that of the other planes.
[You’re making yourself completely vulnerable. I’m not suggesting you attack, but landing and turning off your shields represents an unacceptable risk.]
I shut off the comm, and quietly asked, “What would you suggest?”
[If you have to appear vulnerable, lower the jet, but don’t land, and give me permission to turn on the shields whenever I think it’s necessary.]
“You need my permission?”
[Yes. My makers wanted artificial intelligences limited to minimize their risk.]
Flick threw a ball into the main group of heavy bird bots as they began to run across the floor toward us.
The ball punctured the bird bot’s chest, coming out the other side, and continuing through each bot behind it.
I’d never known for sure what her power was, but it had something to do with controlling mass and momentum. I’d heard that there were very specific rules about how it worked, but I’d never seen her in action, so I didn’t know what they were. Continue reading Breaking & Entering: Part 12
Much like in the control room, the second floor mostly stayed together. Spots of concrete fell and the nearest section of floor simply bent downward toward us, giving us a view of storage rooms.
A file cabinet slid sideways, and fell into the room, landing on the melted remains of the cloning tanks.
It would have been great if that had been the end of it.
It wasn’t, but it looked like it for a second.
Cassie lowered the gun. “Let’s get out of here.”
Well, the gun shouldn’t become a problem, I told myself, not if Cassie’s around to control it.
On the other hand, I thought, you could argue that it might be even less of a problem if Cassie and every one of us completely ignored it forever. In fact, thinking about it abstractly, you could argue that Cassie’s very existence was a problem. If (as government scientists suspected) spliced in DNA caused the Abominator citizen’s mark to be written as a structure in her brain, reverse engineering it would open up the possibility of humans using truly horrible technologies.
Plus, what if aliens wanted it too for some reason? If anybody, they ought to have access to Abominator technology and the ability to remake it, right? On the other hand, Grandpa had implied that outside of their appearance on Earth, the Abominators had been gone for a while.
Then I remembered that Bullet said that the Nine had been infiltrated by aliens. Continue reading Here We Come: Part 4
Haley’s lips twisted. “Are you sure you want them to connect? Remember when we flew into space and that robot attached itself to the ship? I don’t want anything like that to happen. Especially not right now.”
I remembered it very well, and I could see her point. Technically though, the gun wasn’t anything like that robot.
Arguably it was worse. The robot had just wanted to escape while the gun (at least the way Cassie described it) took joy in destroying things.
So if I was going to use the ship to boost the gun’s range, I needed to start carefully.
I reached out, detached the gun’s holster from the clip on the chair, and picked it up.
“Gun, can you contact the ship? I’d like to ask you some questions. It’ll make it easier to get Cassie back.”
The flight to Ann Arbor to pick up Rachel and Jaclyn took less than 10 minutes.
We picked them up at a small lake Rachel had called “Barton Pond.” Whatever it was, it was large enough for me to find from the air, and float over while they boarded. Plus it was dark enough out that we wouldn’t be too obvious.
They were in costume. All in white, Rachel’s gun hung from her utility belt. Jaclyn’s costume was purple, as ever, and unlike anyone else on our team, she wore a mask instead of a bullet resistant hood.
Being basically invulnerable, she could do that.
As they pulled on their seat belts, Jaclyn said, “So, do we have a plan this time?”