The
TWILIGHT OF THE GODS -- Chap. 6
A
story of Mantra and Black September
By
Aladdin and Christopher Leeson
Posted 8-10-2022
THE BAD PENNY
“By seeking and blundering, we learn."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Are you sure that what you intend to do won’t get us both killed? Or at least me?”
We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.
“There is always that risk, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
"Please don’t quote cliches you probably don’t even understand. As reckless as you are, I don’t see how you’ve stayed alive this long. But if you think that you finally have the right questions to ask, how are we going to go about solving the central problem?”
“Elementary. The analysis of our data base should suggest a workable hypothesis!”
The redheaded alien got to work, creating readouts that a Dark Age warrior couldn’t hope to understand. Suddenly Gabriel gasped and exclaimed, “I now can see what caused the Nemesis Energy to downgrade to such a degree!”
“Are you going to say eureka?”
“I dare say I should!”
"So what did you spy with your little eye?"
"I spy -- I see -- that the X-Factor, the unknown quality -- is a woman."
"A woman? A human woman?" I asked.
"Her readings are distinctly human, but her power-ratings are astonishing. Her readings do not meet the parameters of a goddess, so she must be an ultra – and an ultra of almost unimaginable potency. The lady appeared suddenly in New York out of a time dilation field. But she didn’t arrive alone. She was carrying the temporal clones of both the Time Gem and Reality Gems.”
“What? How did she get her hands on two of the Infinity Gems – or even their clones?”
“It’s a paradox, I grant. I very much suspect that the two Gems must have assisted her in attacking the array of the seven!”
“What’s going on? Are Gem clones fighting with other Gem clones?”
“Apparently, but for the time being it is vital to find out who this X-Factor is."
A digital photo took form on a view screen. The mystery woman appeared to be young, human, and attractive -- three qualities that always make me well disposed toward any woman who has them.
He exclaimed: "Now!"
"Now, what?"
“Now I will run the recognition software,” the Timekeeper said.
"Don’t bother," I said.
Gabriel glanced up. “Why shouldn’t I?”
Taking a deep breath, I let it out: "Because I know her.”
“You do? Who is she?” Gabriel asked.
“That's Amber Hunt."
#
What were the chances? Out of the countless trillions of universe’s inhabitants, how was it that the “X-Factor” who miraculously intervened to stand in the way of Nemesis should turn out to be one of the finite people number of people whom I knew?
Well, to be more exact, I knew Amber Hunt from distant personal sightings and from that files that Aladdin had compiled concerning her.
Also, I was not forgetting that Amber Hunt's name had kept turning up in that alternate world. The young woman was a true bad penny. She had apparently been part of an ultra gang being sought as suspect in the destruction of twenty-five percent of New York City.
And my mind was filling with other information, too -- things that I didn’t even know I knew. They had to have come from my VIGOPS connection. I had become like a computer with a wireless card and the VIGOPS was acting like the the WIFI connection feeding me information.
I know knew that before Amber Hunt had a psychotic episode in which she came very close to destroying the Earth with gamma rays, she had been a college girl. I knew, too, that she was descended from an American POW who’d been held in a Nazi prison camp. At the same camp was a biological research station and the Reich was using prisoners of war as experimental subjects. It had been set up in that location in the hope that the Allied prisoners would serve as human shields for deterring the Allies’ aerial bombardment of the site. But the American high command bombed the Nazi research facility regardless. It didn’t seem to know or care that the air strike was going to release a disease culture stored there into the open air, infecting both camp personnel and prisoners. Decades later, an American research scientist named Dr. Rachel Deming would learn about the Axis wartime project and also discover the research that most of the rest of the world had been kept ignorant of. She called her discovery the Theta Virus.
The virus had originally come to Earth inside a UFO that had crashed in Germany. The virus culture displayed amazing properties and Nazi research believed that it had the properties that would create super-soldiers. The Nazis had already created a type of short-lived ultra by using the virus on human subjects. Because of the lab leak, hundreds of people were infected by the super-soldier virus. The virus did no lasting harm to normal humans exposed to it, but it altered their DNA. Their children born afterwards were subject to the full effect of the genetic alteration. Unfortunately, most of these young people died in early adulthood, before their ultra abilities developed.
Deming located a score of seriously ill young people and used a cure that she’d developed from a Nazi prototype. The remedy put the Theta Virus into remission and in remission the mutation didn’t kill the subjects, but instead stimulated the full development of the subject’s potential ultra powers. Deming recruited those subjects who displayed the most useful abilities into an ultra team she dubbed “the Exiles.” The very last Theta victim that she discovered and brought to her lab had been Amber Hunt.
Hunt’s grandfather had been an infected POW. His daughter, her mother, had died of a mysterious illness shortly after Amber was born. At this point, the information coming into my mind became speculative. Deming presumably informed Hunt that she had inherited a genetic condition that would prove fatal if she didn’t receive special treatment. But something went wrong inside Deming’s laboratory and an explosion wiped out the facility and killed and crippled most of the ultras that belonged to the Exiles team. The VIGOPS information speculated that Amber Hunt had personally survived that explosion only because she'd gained the ability to absorb destructive energy and change it into something that wouldn’t kill her. But the girl’s subsequent behavior gave indication that the disease, the treatment, or some collateral cause, had rendered her violently insane.
So now Amber Hunt, with her very strange and tragic life history, had somehow become the Factor X that Multiverse had to depend on for its survival.
Try to make sense out of that!
#
"This is inconceivable, Gabriel,” I said. “How could a human body -- even an ultra-human’s body -- absorb the kind of god-like power commanded of Nemesis?"
"I don’t know," the alien scientist replied gravely. "Possibly, the influence of the Time and Reality Gems enabled her to carry out her mission.”
"It all seems like a big coincidence, and I’m suspicious of coincidences. You don't suppose that she was…created…to do this very thing?" I asked.
"Created by whom?"
I swallowed a lump. "By something bigger and hopefully better than Nemesis."
He brightened. “Ah, you must be speaking of the One who was the Maker of the Demiurge. We know so little about that entity. If your hypothesis were true, it would be a very wonderful thing, don’t you think?”
"I suppose. I’m okay with having Somebody out there who’s looking out for us little people. But if that's so, even bringing in the big guns failed. I mean, if you’re right, the Multiverse is still doomed.”
“Such pessimism,” Gabriel said with a sigh. “Millions of years of data tell us that the most important component of success is always optimism.”
“If it is or isn’t, our big problem we're facing is finding this problem child before it’s too late."
He referred to his instruments again. "We'll trace Miss Hunt by following her data signature -- in retrograde through time and space.
"How easy is that going to be?"
"Fairly easy. The intrusive nature of her power has already broken so many of the rules of quantum dimensional physics that it has left the equivalent of a bloody trail through the fabric of reality."
"So, you’re sure that we can catch up with her?"
"Quite.”
“But how can we get her to do what we want her to do? It seems to me that anyone as powerful as she is doesn’t have to take orders from anyone.”
"Remember what I said about optimism?"
“And another thing -- what good will it do messing around with this version of Amber Hunt? Isn’t she just a temporal clone of the original? Don’t we have to get our hands on the real Amber Hunt-- the one who belongs in Zero Time-- to do any real good?”
“Excellent reasoning, Mantra!” he said. “But finding the location of this clone might put us on the precise track of the original.”
"So, our next step is what? A manhunt? A womanhunt?"
"Exactly," Gabriel affirmed. “When we find her, we will only need to ask her to do what she is willing to do anyway. But we'll ask her to do it in a different way; we’ll tweak the manner of her mission so she can do it more efficiently, thereby saving the Multiverse."
"I get it,” I said. “But if we’re going to be correcting her mistakes, won’t the two of us also have to make zero mistakes ourselves?”
“Obviously. But the two of us are just going to have to do the best we can,” he said.
That wasn’t much of an answer, but something else was bothering me. I had started to realize that Amber Hunt wasn’t just a soulless killing machine. She had started out as an ordinary girl who was born with a tragic illness. Wouldn’t Gabriel still sacrifice her ruthlessly if it meant saving all of Creation?
Of course he would! And, Hell, I was pretty sure that I would do the exact same thing if the problem were dumped in my lap.
#
Gabriel launched us on our trip through space and time. I expected that I’d have time for a nap, but even before I could find my personal cabin, I heard his voice through the comm system.
“We’re here,” the Timekeeper said.
I immediately went back to the control center and took a gander from the nearest port.
What I saw outside wasn’t anything like I was expecting.
We were not hovering above some Planet Z in the Sagittarian Arm of the Galaxy. Instead, we were in my present home town -- Los Angeles, California.
Had Amber Hunt had been hiding in Los Angeles all this time?
Apparently.
But this version of that city was a Los Angeles from Hell.
It looked like a cityscape inspired by some drug addict’s apocalyptic nightmare.
The metropolis had an ash-gray cast under a dirty-looking sky. Everything about it was so ruined and ugly that I couldn’t help but wonder if the atmosphere wasn’t poisonous. I suddenly had a dread thought. Had I had temporal clones of my kids and my friends down there? Could any of them be still alive?
"What happened here?" I asked the Timekeeper. "It's Los Angeles, but it looks like it’s been through a war."
"Something terrible has occurred."
"Well, duh, I can see that much."
"I mean that this whole planet is under siege by the Nemesis energy."
"It's here already here? I thought we’d gone back in time!"
"No. Amber Hunt’s trail took us into the future, not the past. The probability is that when the Nemesis Wave was released, something shifted this whole universe into attenuated time, so as to prevent the first wave of destruction from striking.
“That’s good, isn’t it?”
“It is good, but it only amounts to a Band-Aid, not any permanent fix.”
"Are you saying that this universe has been under attack from Nemesis for seven years?
"No. But the equivalent of seven years has passed in this Earth’s attenuated time.”
“This is too crazy. I say, let’s get this dirty job done with and then get out of here.”
“We must not be hasty. This peculiar situation might have something to do with the fact that Amber Hunt will see fit to come here. If we can find out how the Nemesis Energy has been been held at bay up to this point, it may give us an entirely new approach for saving the Multiverse.”
“Didn’t we have a workable plan already?” I asked.
“We have one plan, but we may yet come up with a better one. I only know this much: There is a protective field safeguarding this solar system. The whole rest of the universe blinked out of existence long ago. To make matters worse, our sensors reveal that the field has been progressively weakening for seven years. Attenuated time cannot permanently stop the flow of time; it can only slow it down. I expect that the field saved this solar system when it was only nanoseconds from destruction. This unnatural state cannot be maintained for much longer. The estimated time of collapse is only two days away -- in attenuated time, I mean! But that’s only a very rough guess. I will have to work in haste to secure a more accurate measurement"
“If the dam breaks, are we going to be destroyed with everything else?” I asked.
“Our systems for self-defense are very efficient. As you know, we’ve avoided the Nemesis Energy once already today. But unless we can do what we came here to do, the Multiverse will eventually end and we cannot possibly survive that.
“Tell me, what source of power is strong enough to protect an entire solar system, even for a mere seven years?"
"Several things, I suppose. But in my personal knowledge, there is only one thing: the Infinity Gems. And we already have good reason to associate Amber Hunt with two such Gems. I must at once scan for any local traces of their presence."
So far, the VIGOPS hadn’t taught me how to read his displays, so I just stood off and let him do his thing.
"I do see indications of the Time Gem down below," Gabriel finally said. "This scan confirms that neither Amber Hunt nor the Reality Gem have arrived yet. It is conceivable that she may already have possession of the Reality Gem and is now on her way here to seize the Time Gem.
If that Gem had been the key to Earth’s local survival, her theft of it would end the solar system even before its last two days passed. All this apocalyptic stuff was making a nervous wreck of me! "So, where is Amber Hunt now?" I asked.
“She isn’t here yet. We came early so we could lay in wait for her arrival. If she’s hostile, the two of us will have the element of surprise.”
"Then this hasn’t been her hideout all along? It’s just a stop along her way?" I inquired.
"Correct.
“I’m still worried that she won’t listen to us. In the past she’s acted like she’s psychotic and out of control.”
“That’s possible," he said, “so we will have to plan for that contingency.”
I had another question for him. "Was it the Nemesis Energy that’s made a wreck of Los Angeles? Or was it the Time Gem? Or a nuclear war?"
He shook his head. "None of them. The clue to what happened here is the anomalous local concentration of volcanic ash."
"Come again?"
"This city has had heavy rain from an ash cloud. It appears that this planet has suffered from a super volcanic explosion. That’s reasonable. Your Earth has lived in fear of such a disaster for decades.”
"Well, whatever is happened here, it looks like there's been looting, rioting, and street-fighting. The Los Angeles I knew had about nineteen million people, but this wreck of a city couldn’t support more than a few thousand. The looters must have taken what they wanted and everyone else starved to death."
Gabriel nodded. "Too true. Human violence often accompanies natural catastrophes."
I took another long look by way of the view-port. I started to wonder if something could be done to help the people still alive, even if those people were the icy-hearted looters who had added to the misery, but couldn’t think of anything. And what was the point in trying to save them? The Nemesis energy would break through and blink out the entire solar system in a couple days anyhow. We had to keep our focus on the mission. Capturing Amber Hunt was the only thing that mattered. As soon as we accomplished that, we had to take her away safe to somewhere better than this heart of devastation!
“What do we do if Hunt doesn’t arrive?” I asked.
"She will come," Gabriel said with professorial certainty.
I waited, but the little man didn't elaborate.
What a time for the annoyingly garrulous Gabriel to become a man of few words!
TO BE CONTINUED IN CHAPTER 7.
