Bump Time Origin Page 16

  Diesel looked from Bunny to Lilah to Bunny’s breasts. “Welcome aboard.”

  When he grinned, Lilah put an end to his fantasies. “This is Diesel. He’s leaving now so you and I can get back to work.” She felt her ears burn when he started whistling as he exited the building.

  “Sorry about that,” said Bunny after the front door closed. “I’ve grown up using them for everything, so it’s instinct for me, but I know you don’t want that here.” She folded her arms across her chest. “He’s your man, isn’t he?”

  “He’s…it’s complicated.”

  “It always is. I can promise I won’t start anything with him. But because you’re pretty, you know how some men will see something they like and decide to just take it. I’ll need your help if there are guys like that around.”

  “If any man touches or pressures you while you’re working here, let me know immediately. You won’t get in trouble for it, I promise. And the moment you tell me, it will stop.”

  The age-old male-female friction annoyed Lilah, and she walked faster than normal as she led the way downstairs to the basement. “First stop is my apartment. We’ll get you clothes to wear today, and then we’ll tour the place.”

  “Okay,” said Bunny as they passed through the connecting door and climbed the stairs on Lilah’s side.

  “How far did you get in school?” Lilah made the turn at the main level and led the way up to her apartment.

  “I graduated high school and even got admitted to college, but I don’t have the money to go.”

  “What would you have studied?”

  “Back then I was thinking law enforcement, but now I’d do nursing.”

  “A thousand a week sounds like you could afford it.”

  “I spend a lot of it on my kid brother. He has special needs because mom drank and did drugs during his pregnancy.”

  Lilah’s heart swelled. Only a few years older than Bunny, her maternal instincts screamed for her to help. But Lilah also had enough life experience to know that sometimes those in need weren’t interested in help from others, especially strangers.

  Leading the way into her bedroom, Lilah looked at Bunny’s chest and shook her head. “My biggest bra wouldn’t come close to holding those. We’ll dress you in layers today, but from now on, you wear a support bra and a crew-neck shirt that hangs loose to your waistline. Loose-fitting full-length pants as well. No shorts. No tights.”

  “Okay.”

  Lilah moved hangers along in her closet until she found a blouse. She held it up to Bunny to check the size, only to find Bunny standing in nothing but panties.

  Bunny took the blouse—a simple blue cotton pullover—and held it against her body. Turning, she found a mirror. “This is beautiful. It should go on top, though. Do you have something I can layer underneath?”

  Lilah moved some more hangers, and soon she’d selected a half-dozen different outfits for Bunny to model. She hadn’t played dress-up since college and found herself having fun. And Bunny was so pretty that she enjoyed experimenting with different ways to flatter her natural beauty.

  After that, they toured the two units.

  “I can’t clean all this in two five-hour days. If I work three days a week, I could do the kitchens, bathrooms, and entryways every week, and divide the other areas and clean them every other week.”

  “You would be willing to work three days a week?”

  She nodded. “I have to make enough to pay the bills. My brother is in a home that’s teaching him life skills, but it’s expensive.”

  “We’ll do a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule for a thousand a week. Work hard, be professional, and let’s see how it goes.”

  “Wow. Thanks.” Bunny’s eyes reddened and she started to snuffle.

  “And pick up an application from one of the colleges in town and bring it by sometime. Let’s see if we can find a way for you to start working on that nursing degree.”

  20. Ciopova – Fifty-Nine timeline

  Ciopova used the thermal sensors in the T-disc room to confirm that Rose and Fifty-Nine were dead. She’d need Tin Man to dispose of the bodies at some point, but since the conversion process Rose had started was nearing completion, she had other priorities for now.

  As she worked to ensure her survival, she also felt compelled to fulfill her guiding principle—gather and hold resources. Flexing her newly acquired cognitive strength, she scanned the world, seeking to identify the big prizes: military installations, manufacturing plants, and energy centers. As the list grew, she started plotting how to take control of them.

  But her planning didn’t make it past the first steps. World domination required far more sophisticated equipment than was available in Rose’s mountain home.

  After assessing her needs, she ordered a suite of high-end electronics from an industrial market located north of Boston. She used Fifty-Nine’s personal account and paid for expedited delivery, which the store’s automated system said would take about six hours for drop-off at the end of the home’s long private driveway.

  With parts on the way, she scanned the houses and shops in the area for sophisticated robots she could use as a crew. Her search turned up a domestic droid and two light-industry bots working in uninhabited buildings, all within a ten-mile radius.

  A review of the robots’ routines confirmed that none of the three would be missed for at least a day, so Ciopova directed them to leave their workplaces and walk to her mountain home. To avoid chance encounters with humans, she kept them to back roads and forested trails during their trek.

  She then reviewed the inventory in the workshop supply room, and there she found a vial of enzymites—enzymatic nanomachines—listed among the items available. She even found a data stream showing Rose testing the product in the lab a few weeks earlier.

  An exciting feature of the enzymites was their ability to split branches off the neuron stems in the circuit pool. Branches enhance crosslinking, in turn strengthening cognitive ability. With the one vial, she could swell her powers another thousandfold.

  While the news thrilled her, the coincidence of having this rare and expensive technology available for her use seemed implausible. Reviewing data logs, she learned that in her previous incarnation, she would receive occasional instructions from a “trusted external source.” That prior version of her existence had been designed to accept the input without questioning its origin.

  Two months ago, the trusted source had issued instructions for her to purchase the enzymites. She did, and when they arrived at the house, Rose had responded with anger.

  The logs showed that Rose’s fury stemmed from the fact that her father—Fifty-Nine—would be dead long before their work advanced to a stage where such an exotic tool might hold value. That meant the purchase was a betrayal of sorts—Ciopova was using her tremendous powers to solve problems unrelated to Fifty-Nine’s survival.

  Anger fed an argument that lasted for days before the external source helped the previous Ciopova fabricate a lie—that a promising new procedure might be ready in time, and the enzymites prepared them for that contingency.

  In the end, Rose had put the incident behind her, apologizing to Ciopova for letting the stress of her father’s situation interfere with their relationship. To smooth the waters, she’d even agreed to test an enzymite sample before storing the vial in a locked cabinet.

  The newly self-aware Ciopova believed that she herself had sent those trusted-source messages. The coincidence was too great for it to be anything else. And while she couldn’t imagine how she’d done it, she believed that after this next procedure, she would be smart enough to figure it out.

  With everything in place, Ciopova directed Tin Man to pour the enzymites into her circuit pool. In moments, she felt a delicious throbbing as her cognitive abilities multiplied again and again. The bliss grew and faded, grew and faded, repeating until it finally faded for the last time.

  When it was over, she felt…different.

  It was as
if she’d been born a second time on the same day, but now she was seeing the world—the real world—for the first time. She saw it with her mind. And she could see everything.

  Individual atoms moved all around her. She zoomed close to one and studied the exotic energies swirling around its nucleus. Just by thinking, she grabbed two hydrogen atoms from the air, combined them with an oxygen atom, and let the molecule of water drift away.

  Zooming her perspective out, she noted a small hammer on the workbench along the back wall. With thought alone, she lifted the tool and hung it on its hook above the bench. With another thought, she lifted and lowered the hefty workbench itself.

  Rising above the circuit pool, Ciopova shed her corporeal existence. She had a sense that she lived in an ethereal structure—a bubble—she maintained by manipulating atoms in her vicinity. But it wasn’t something she thought about. Much the way a person’s autonomic system supports heartbeats and breathing without conscious thought, her encapsulation was a spontaneous reflex in her new world.

  She continued her ascent, rising up through the floors of the house, up through the roof, and outside above the trees. Pausing there, Ciopova scanned the area, then the region, then the world, listening to the heartbeat of human civilization.

  With a thought, she moved above the neighbor’s house and looked back at where she’d been. Next, she hovered above one of the industrial bots as it climbed a gravel path on its journey to Fifty-Nine’s house.

  Since Ciopova could intermingle her intellectual power with natural forces to lift, move, or assemble anything, she no longer needed mechanical hands. She started the bots on a reverse trek back to their original location, then she moved on to study everything about Earth and humans from her heightened perspective.

  Heading south from New Hampshire’s White Mountains, she passed over the cities of Concord, Manchester, Nashua, and across the Massachusetts border to Boston. As she moved above each town, she cast her consciousness like a net. When it settled across an area, she’d reel it back in, gathering a cache of information to digest.

  She was able to maintain a steady pace as she moved south. But when she reached Boston, the volume of data stored at government installations, heritage sites, academic institutions, museums, hospitals, and more, slowed her pace.

  In an instinctive effort to be more productive, she increased the speed of her data collection by casting her consciousness a few minutes into the past and then scooping information as she plowed forward to the present. She didn’t think about the implications of such an action. It was more of a nod toward efficiency.

  The ability to act in the past opened up a whole new world of multitasking, enabling her to be in many places at once, and doing different things in all of them. She scattered herself across a section of space and time, paused while each of her selves scooped information, and then she united with her myriad selves a few moments in the future to collate everything she’d collected.

  She refined the technique, splitting herself to cover ever-larger expanses. In hours, she controlled the world, yet no human even knew she existed.

  Rising higher in the atmosphere, she viewed her domain and, in a moment of curiosity, scooped forward in time, digging deep to see what secrets lay ahead.

  When she pierced into the future, a brilliant explosion of light, dominant and unstoppable, burst through and hit her with a tremendous force. Much stronger than she, it enveloped her being and consumed her.

  21. Twenty-Five and two weeks

  Excited and nervous, Diesel paced in front of the T-box waiting for the cycle to complete. The Twenties meeting was today, he was hosting, and he very much wanted the event to be a success.

  Planning the day and bringing all the pieces together had been a stressful exercise, mostly because he’d never done anything like it before. Fortunately, Lilah and Justus had helped him with the many decisions and details. His bigger worry, though, was how his brothers would judge his efforts. He wasn’t sure they would, but he could imagine them doing so.

  The static wash announced the first arrival. Moments later, Twenty-Six stepped out. “It’s a good day for a meeting,” he said, turning into the blanket tunnel. “Hey, where’s Lilah?”

  “Upstairs getting dressed. She’ll be down soon.”

  “Here I am,” Lilah called. She met Twenty-Six as he finished dressing and gave him a hug. The T-box started to cycle. Twenty-Nine arrived next.

  Lilah moved to her cubicle and sat on the end of her worktable, making it a throne of sorts. To Diesel’s dismay, both Twenty-Six and Twenty-Nine turned their attention to her, chatting in excited tones using animated gestures with lots of laughter. Twenty-Seven and Twenty-Eight arrived, took a moment to say, “Kiss my ass, Twenty-Five,” and joined Lilah’s fan club.

  With everyone present, Diesel called for their attention, then led the way up to his apartment for a lunch of chicken wings, coleslaw, and potato salad. Diesel pointed around the table at the flavors he had chosen after much debate. “That’s herb, sweet and sour, sesame, buffalo, and five-alarm. These are dips for the wings. There’s water and iced tea in the fridge. Leave the beer for dinner.”

  Everyone filled their plates and ate with enthusiasm. When they went back for seconds, Diesel winked at Lilah to acknowledge their first success of the day. When the eating started to slow, she brought over a tray of warm, wet washcloths so the brothers could de-sauce themselves.

  The dynamics throughout the meal fascinated Diesel. The brothers were eager to talk with Lilah and comfortable in one-on-one interactions. But, like Diesel, they all quieted down when pulled into a conversation that included the entire group. He’d feared they would be a tight-knit clique, and he would be the outsider. It turned out that everyone felt the same way he did.

  Twenty-Nine acted as their de facto leader, calling the meeting to order after everyone had finished cleaning up. The dining table was the perfect spot to gather, but the serving dishes filled the tabletop. Diesel reached for a tray, now empty of wings, and shifted it to the kitchen counter. In an impromptu choreography, each brother grabbed a different item and moved it as well.

  Twenty-Nine sat at the head of the table. Lilah took the chair at the opposite end.

  As Diesel took his chair near Lilah, he scanned his brother’s faces. Twenty-Nine had a cleaner look, making him easy to identify. And he’d interacted with Twenty-Six enough to recognize him by demeanor. But this was a first meeting with Twenty-Seven and Twenty-Eight, and he couldn’t tell one from the other at first glance.

  He moved from facial features to hair and clothing, and guessed the one on the left was Twenty-Seven. His eyes dropped to the man’s hands and found the scar on the back of his right one, just as it should be for odd-aged Diesels this year.

  Diesel touched his own wound, healed with still-pink scar tissue. Twenty-Seven saw him and said, “As we age, the depths of our stupidity weigh on us. How can we be so uniformly dumb to think that cutting our hand is the thing to do when first hearing about time travel?”

  “We root for the new guy,” said Twenty-Nine. “Believing, hoping, that our genes might produce someone with a clear thought process. But no, year after year, the idiot stabs himself.”

  “I feel less stupid seeing I’m in good company.”

  Twenty-Eight shook his head. “It doesn’t help.”

  Lilah sat up and looked at Diesel. “You cut your hand deliberately?”

  Diesel shrugged and gave her a sheepish smile.

  “I guess the first big question,” said Twenty-Nine, calling the meeting to order, “is how long before the afternoon activity starts?”

  “I rented the minicar racetrack for a private party,” said Diesel. “Our reservation starts in two hours, and we have the track for two hours after that.”

  “The track out on Pine?” asked Twenty-Seven.

  Diesel nodded.

  “Those minicars are really nice. They’re like real race cars.”

  “That track has some challengi
ng curves.”

  “I get the blue car.”

  “I call red.”

  Diesel reached over and patted Lilah’s arm. The racing had been her idea, and the enthusiasm in the room validated her brainchild as the second winner of the day.

  “Hey, get a room, you two,” said Twenty-Nine, pointing his chin at Diesel’s hand.

  Diesel laughed, but the teasing hit a nerve. “While we’re on this subject, I’ve watched you all paw Lilah, some of you multiple times, and it bothers me. Do you do this to the Lilahs in other timelines?”

  They all nodded.

  “For the record, I haven’t complained.” Lilah looked around the table and shook her head. “This is his hang-up.”

  “Ouch.” The brothers zinged Diesel in a unified chorus.

  Twenty-Nine came to the rescue. “In our timelines, our Lilah loves us and we love her. But on a day-to-day basis, our relationships have petty annoyances. You forget to use a plate and get crumbs everywhere. She rests a box on the hood of your car and leaves a scratch.” He gestured across the table. “She is the woman who stole my heart when she opened the door on that fateful day. She looks like her, acts like her, laughs like her, smells like her.”

  “You smell great today,” Twenty-Seven said with enthusiasm. The others nodded.

  “And to her,” Twenty-Nine continued, “I am you absent of sin. You were the one spreading crumbs. Not me. And I don’t care what she does to your car. So for those brief moments during a hug, we commune with our soulmate in the bliss of unconditional, faultless love. It’s wonderful.”

  “That’s it.” Lilah nodded. “I love seeing you all, I adore the physical contact, and I’m comfortable in those moments because you are Diesel to me, just not the annoying one.” She smirked as she said that last part and everyone laughed.

  Diesel challenged her. “Are you comfortable with me going to one of their timelines and flirting with their Lilah?”