Rise of Serpents Read online

  Looking around the harbor in a conscious effort, Nikki saw boats small and large and of all types, though the yachts, the size of the Sukkal and larger, stood out. Nikki whispered to herself not intending for anyone else to hear, “What are their names?”

  She read them one by one: Beltway Bandit, Progressive Living, Neocon Way, The Fed, Never Waste a Crisis, The Christless, Divide and Conquer, Divide and Plunder, D. C. Gravy, It’s Not Your Money, UNHammer, Collective Justice, and the Sukkal. This last name carried with it the Sumerian meaning of “courier.” The Sukkal was their ship after getting rescued from the Wind Runner weeks ago. The rest of those ships seemed to be natured in politics as names of the Privileged in contemporary organizations in and around Washington, D.C. and New York and political statements that found their way as common slogans in the pop culture and the media. Many she heard through her teen years. Others, she heard more recently from political candidates and office holders prior to leaving the states on their South American dig.

  “A who’s who of politicos and celebrities,” Anders commented as he stepped next to Nikki. Anders’s strong voice intruded on Nikki’s moment of distress and her struggle to conquer it. She blinked several times before seeing him clearly. With his dark goatee and wearing his adventurer field attire . . . including his brown hat he kept taking off and putting on, trying to get the right fit. He looked the part of that old movie archeologist, but with now tamed black curly hair instead of the dishevelment he allowed in the field.

  “You know I’m not interested in politics,” Nikki reminded him.

  “I’m only interested enough to find ways to work around the politicos,” Anders clarified, “. . . and the corrupt trappings of their system. It’s frustrating and dangerous to anyone daring to get something done.”

  Nikki really wanted to avoid the politics, even more so at Anders’s reminder of why she just wanted to tune it all out. She found politics viciously intimidating and demoralizing and wanted nothing to do with it.

  “You should know after everything you had to do to get permission for our dig in Bolivia.” Nikki recalled Anders’s long fight with both the U.S. and Bolivian governments to gain permission for the dig. In the end, Anders told her he had to have the university pay unlisted “fees” to get the proper permissions. A feat he refused to reveal how he had achieved it.

  “You look like our friend standing there with that expression,” Anders commented, nodding at Aren.

  “That’s scary,” Nikki flatly replied, though she felt surprised at the comparison. “How?”

  “He gets that distant look in his eyes . . . sometimes,” Anders answered while watching Aren with his contemplative expression as the Evendiir examined the resort hotel and convention center structures to their north. “As if he’s someplace else or seeing things we can’t. It’s a little unnerving.”

  “He is and can,” Nikki confirmed Anders’s observations. Looking westward at the small harbor dock the robotic skiff drove them toward, Nikki felt in the back of her mind something she couldn’t quite identify. Then, she realized what he was looking at. “Sometimes, when I’m calm with a ‘blank mind’ . . . wandering with my thoughts and . . . always when in his presence, I can almost see what he sees. Shadows, ghostly shapes, and vague symbols and . . . lines and waves . . . mostly.”

  A sharp glance from Mr. Miller silently told her not to speak in the open details of anything concerning them. Nikki fell quiet. She, Anders, Aren, and Rogaan all received the same guidance from Dunkle and Miller. They explained how surveillances using multispectral, vibrational, and audio sensors would be everywhere and to act as if everything they did and spoke of was being watched and recorded. Nikki felt her cheeks warming as she realized what she had done. Feeling their amusement, she glanced at Rogaan and Aren. She found the dark-haired Rogaan openly smiling behind his short beard dressed in his blue, red, and black steel armor over a mix of tanniyn . . . dinosaur hide and cloth clothes with his blue metal blow, quiver of arrows, and sheathed short sword riding high on his back. His forearm bands . . . his mahbi’barzil, the Tellen name for blue steel, Ra’Sakti with five embedded dark Agni stones each, shaped and flowed over his muscles as if his very own skin. Feeling both comforted and unease where the Ra’Sakti was concerned, Nikki didn’t know quite why, though she felt Rogaan constantly exerting his will over an unseen presence.

  The platinum-haired Aren’s appearance was different in many ways. Instead of armor, the Evendiir stood tall clothed in his dark pants of worked dinosaur leather, a dark blue, short sleeved tunic of cloth under a sleeveless, above-the-knee robe of dark cloth and dinosaur hide. A wrapping of brown and lighter colored dinosaur hide belt bands tied off to a dark metal circular buckle kept his robe closed and well fitting. His boots were high to his calf with his pants drawn over the tops and leather crisscrossing bands of dinosaur leather wrapped about his upper boots and lower legs. Aren wore dinosaur hide and cloth forearm wrappings also with leather band wrappings. Nikki knew he wore the wrappings to cover what was underneath, a set of black, steel, arm bracelets half the length of Rogaan’s Ra’Sakti. Being very guarding of them, Nikki only viewed the bracelets briefing in Dr. Dunkle’s lab before Aren reclaimed them. A pair of Agni-encrusted barzil rings on each of Aren’s hands and a necklace pendant with yet another blue Agni stone completed his look. Rogaan and Aren carried the full look of any cosplay characters she ever saw, yet she knew they were real . . . and despite their lightheartedness, they confidently carried themselves in a way that gave a sense of dangerous power to any giving them more than a glance.

  Nikki struggled a little hopping off the robotic skiff to the dock. Anders and Rogaan both gave her concerned gazes. She felt her cheeks warming at their attentions. Aren playfully slapped Rogaan on the back of his armor.

  “End with the eyes,” he teased his friend. “That one is to show enough pal as Suhd and pleasing eyes as pili as Dajil.”

  “Nikki . . . looks nothing like them.” Rogaan sounded defensive.

  “Truth . . .” Aren continued to tease as he walked off following Dunkle and Miller. Aren then spoke in Antaalin instead of English. “Maa bi unsa til za pad kana gerebu sha.”

  Nikki felt her warm cheeks turn into a raging fire. How does Aren see me as charming . . . in that way . . . and trouble? She looked down at her split green dress to ensure she wasn’t showing more than she thought; then she yelled after Aren, “I am not showing any crotch!”

  Anders looked at her, his eyes filled with confusion and jealously. She forced herself to speak calmly as if nothing just happened, hoping to deflect Aren’s teasing of his friend as just that. “We should be keeping up, Shawn.”

  The six of them moved quickly along wide concrete pathways between a parking lot half-filled with parked robotic passenger vehicles to their right and a heavy trafficked road on their left emerging from a tunnel running under the water harbor entrance to the resort marina. Off several hundred yards to their right, the massive Royal Heaven Towers and casino stood.

  “Welcome to the New Risen Atlantis,” Miller announced to the group in his Southern drawl. “The rebuilt resort after the original was destroyed decades ago in the tidal wave caused by a large fragment from the Apophis asteroid strike in the Atlantic Ocean.”

  “We’ve all learned about it in school,” Anders commented. “Apophis passed close to Earth in . . . 2029, missing the keyhole that would have brought it to Earth on its next orbiting return in 2036. On its second pass, it was much closer than should have been, just at the edge of another keyhole. The scientists couldn’t explain its trajectory. The world held its collective breath while nations in their U.N. eventually decided not to try to destroy it because they couldn’t be certain of success. Instead, they decided to track it and launch spacecraft to push it away on its next return.”

  “If not for the Chinese secretly sending two nukes to the asteroid . . .” Miller chimed in speaking with disdain. “Two thirty-megaton nukes to blow it to hell.”

&n
bsp; “Well . . . They didn’t get it all,” Anders commented.

  “No,” Miller answered. “What remained of the asteroid was a large fragment field about a third of the original mass among a cloud of smaller debris. On the next return of Apophis to Earth, many of the smaller fragments from the broken asteroid struck parts of the Pacific, the U.S., Central, and South America. The large fragment struck the Atlantic causing the massive tidal wave wiping out many of the islands of the Bahamas, including this one.”

  “As I recall from the history archives, much of the East Coast in the U.S. suffered a lot of damage from the tidal wave, as well,” Nikki added.

  “Almost all of the East Coast suffered great damage,” Dunkle confirmed and clarified.

  “Damn Chinese,” Miller let out a disdainful rebuke. “They never admitted their wrongdoing until about a decade ago after an old Chinese scientist confessed on his deathbed in the U.S. as being part of the nuking.”

  “After this island was wiped out, he had the opportunity during the restoration to install in secret an ancient artifact that we’re headed to, now,” Dunkle informed in a hushed voice. “One of his companies was contracted to rebuild parts of this resort.”

  “Looking at what was once a family place before Apophis . . .” Miller’s words continued to be filled with disdain. “Now, it’s become a place of debauchery for the well-to-do and government types. They used the disaster to get control of the U.S. government and surrounding territories such as this and have never let go their grip despite our elections.”

  Nikki looked up at the massive hotel on their right. It stood lit up with multicolored lights everywhere and a giant holographic marque projecting above the facility’s main entrance welcoming this year’s cosplay festival and TM2A Tournament.

  “What is T-M-Two-A?” Nikki asked.

  “The reason we’re taking this path to the Risen Cove.” Miller pointed with his thumb at the crowded front entrance to the Royal Heaven Towers on the far side of the parking lot. Nikki took one look and agreed with Miller. The entrance was packed with vehicles and people and many in black uniforms she took as security.

  “The Transhuman Mixed Martial Arts Tournament is centered in the Towers in that hotel, where the cosplay crowds are all over the resort,” Dunkle explained, but not such that Nikki understood.

  “It is dense with . . . technology.” Aren tried to explain in English when he seemed to feel Nikki’s confusion. The Evendiir swept and swirled his arm at the hotel casino’s entrance area. “Difficult to see the people beyond the utterances of their tools.”

  “That much tech and security presents a problem for our decoy PDA and ID devices keeping us masked,” Dunkle further explained in a hushed voice. His ability to understand Aren’s and Rogaan’s translations of their lexicon into English impressed Nikki. “The transhuman, especially in a tournament like this, will have all the latest surveillance tech that we’ve not yet programmed countermeasures for. And, the security is likely to have upped their tech in the hopes the transhumans won’t penetrate and compromise the resort’s cloud and core as they did last year. It was a big issue and a threat to Global Eye and I9. Our Mother-Brother Government was all in a buzzing irritation over the incident. I’m surprised you didn’t hear of it.”

  “We don’t follow the transhumans,” Anders broke into the conversation. “We don’t agree with their pursuits to becoming superhuman or immortal.”

  Nikki felt unsettled at thinking of the transhuman rave and what they do to their own bodies—replacing healthy tissue and organs with synthetic and computer-enhanced parts. “There is something . . . just not right doing that to themselves. It’s . . .”

  “Not natural,” Miller finished her thought.

  “Nor ethical in much of what they do,” the doctor commented, then continued to provide guidance. “Some of the transhumans are little more than walking cybernetic drones controlled by unseen others either on these grounds or linked in from elsewhere. Try to keep your distance from them.”

  “What do you think it does to their . . . souls?” Nikki asked Anders hoping he had an answer that would satisfy her.

  “Transhumans don’t seem to think of a life after,” Anders spoke as the scholarly one, though his bias against transhumanism carried clearly in his tone. “They are fascinated by the possibilities of the technology like people were back when they built personal computers and telecommunications devices in their homes. They want to create and be acknowledged for it, to have built the better ‘rig.’ Others want superhuman abilities. And others still wish to hang on to this world, forever . . . becoming immortal through technology, downloading their minds into it.”

  “But their . . .” Nikki felt conflicted at the freedoms allowing people to become transhuman and even encouraged by their governments, implants infused into flesh without understanding what they were being transformed into.

  “Souls . . .” Dr. Dunkle spoke of what Nikki didn’t say. “Ms. Ricks . . . are not believed to be something special by many of the transhumans. They think cybernetics only changes them for the better. In the early days of prosthetics, the war-wounded, accident survivors, and those unfortunate to suffer disabilities found freedom and restored purpose in life by getting artificial limbs. Technology restoring function to the body and the person was good. But then, we went further, seeking to tie the machine . . . and more carelessly, the computer, to all parts of the human body, to the complete nervous system and deeply into the brain . . . becoming cybernetic beings. We disregarded the cautioning voices, the voices of human ethics and those understanding the nature of humanity as few, including our Founding Fathers, did. A truth that not all people are kind and benevolent or unselfish . . . Not all people are good. Immoral people with enhanced abilities. And worse, these cybernetic systems and connections go both ways . . . allowing access, monitoring, and control of many transhumans by mega-corporations, governments, and those skilled in the tech and with ill intensions. Humanity’s arrogance and ability to dismiss away the unpleasantly obvious . . . ‘it won’t happen to me’ type of wishful and arrogant thinking almost always ends in bad things happening.”

  Rogaan and Aren looked at each other as Nikki felt a knowing feeling passing between them. She glanced at them. “What? What is it?”

  “Your people are little . . . different from what we . . .” Rogaan started to speak, then stopped. Nikki felt a deep sense of regret and pain in Rogaan and even emotional pain in Aren. The latter surprised her.

  “What?” Nikki pressed Rogaan knowing Aren wasn’t the type to talk about his feelings.

  “It takes a strong Light to fight the . . . longings of the body.” Rogaan continued with measured words translating his lexicon into concepts Nikki and the others could understand. “And to fight the . . . call . . . calling of the Agni . . . and to your machines. A fight to not consent . . . to its ruling or to its sway.”

  “The Agni holds within the voices of those possessing it past.” Aren further clarified as he attempted to inform. “Not their Lights, except rare to . . . take place. The voices are of the learned head without their Lights. Or what powerful and skilled Kabir and Kabiri leave behind . . . with a faithful task provided to the empty Agni.”

  “A program?” Dunkle asked to confirm. Aren thought for a while as they walked the concrete path crossing a busy intersection congested with driverless vehicles stopping for them and then starting, again, driving around a large water park on their right. More robotic vehicles traveled back and forth on the road at their left with passengers dressed in all sorts of costumes. Almost everyone they saw was enthralled with their holographic PDA displays. Some had even worked them into and parts of their costumes.

  An occasional breeze carried the aromas of delicious foods to Nikki’s nose, making her stomach grumble. Upbeat music and splashing waters came from inside the waterpark to their right, coming from beyond several sizable two-story buildings, both with large and tall outside cages attached to them. Between and beyond t
he buildings, Nikki and the group spied a lighted lagoon with entertainers jovially speaking on loudspeakers and jumping water animals of some type flying in the air before splashing back into the waters, making an unseen crowd yell excitedly.

  “Yes. A program, Doctor,” Aren finally answered. Nikki felt a sense of satisfaction fill the Evendiir for working the translation. “It . . . holds the empty Agni from performing more . . . than it is ‘programmed,’ but the stones are unsafe. They at times take a Light without . . . care of their . . . ‘programming.’ It is then they become dangerous if a troubled Light is taken.”

  “Would you stop speaking in terms of ‘voices’ and ‘Lights’?” Anders complained. “It all sounds like magic and mysticism to me.”

  “Yes . . .” Nikki answered with a sense of knowing. “It would. The ‘voices’ they speak of are the data of the mind; the memories, experiences, and information we collect over our lives.”

  “And the ‘Light’?” Anders asked.

  “The . . . soul,” Rogaan answered with a prideful grin for figuring out the translation so quickly.

  “The voice means little without the Light.” Aren tied it all together, or so he thought before seeing the confused looks from the group . . . all except Rogaan. “The Light . . . the soul is that which makes you, YOU.”

  “Data on storage, your ‘voice’ known as experiences,” Dunkle summarized to ensure he understood. “Your soul the program with algorithms within it using the data to choose what to do with it.”

  “Interesting theory, or dare I say, a philosophical belief,” Anders the skeptic stated almost as a challenge.

  “Doctor, you are soon to touch a dense utterance,” Aren warned.

  “What?” Dunkle looked at Aren, then all about himself. “I don’t see . . . an utterance.”