Back on earth, many subscribers to this particular path of self-transcendence were already to the point where they could fly, levitate, and bring planes crashing down to the ground just by aiming their palms up at the sky. Considering how things had evolved precipitously since Dean C. Moore’s published works, the guy or gal at the controls on Mars hardly needed to be Chinese. Most Chinese, in fact, didn’t even subscribe to what they considered a lot of mystical nonsense taught by monks to keep their priests safe from attackers, using fear, rather than energy games, to create a protective wall around them.
Corona did a historical survey of the energy grid Transwarp Engine Guy was setting up on the planet. Sure enough, the Martian energy grid was boosted with each addition of a space station sited at one of the planet’s energy nadirs. Pumping more chi through the entire planet would definitely hasten terraforming efforts.
Already life was proliferating around the vortices where the energy veins intersected, like those vents at the bottom of the ocean back on Earth spewing methane from active volcanoes. The bacteria feeding directly on the energy running along the energy veins was supporting higher order forms of life which could get by in the thin, but already somewhat altered Martian atmosphere from what it once was when the first inhabitants arrived. None of those lifeforms had been engineered, planned, or even studied. It was a bottom-up approach to terraforming. They might not end up with the designer world anyone predicted, or even desired, but it would be fairly robust, and perhaps with time, the humanoids and droids would learn to co-create with these “locals.”
But still her mind was nagging at her. The transwarp engine behind all these hijinks, theoretically, could turn the entire planet into a spaceship. Again, why bother? But, as mentioned before, suns did supernovae. And even barring freak accidents like solar storms big enough to damage the newly terraformed Mars, it was just possible the planet could be relocated somewhere more hospitable to life. Maybe someplace where its gravity would be naturally greater. That, or if the planet were ever attacked by aliens, there would be no need to flee the planet. Just make it disappear to some place off grid and away from the front lines. Though the biggest rationale for this terraforming approach might simply be the mad genius effect of one mind gone rogue, and a little too empowered as citizen scientists were these days. By the time anyone caught on and tried to shut him down, he’d be gone. At least that was likely his hope. Or he’d be too fortified with alien tech to much care what Earth tried to do by way of retaliation.
“Not bad,” Gecko said materializing by her side. “You should know, by the way, that I’m having my way with you on the yoga mats, taking our two-person yoga to heights I imagine even your Tantra-loving boyfriend would be jealous of. I think I’m on my third orgasm. If you plan to be any more than a catatonic puppet in my arms for all eternity—a fate I can live with by the way, necrophilia always being a bit of thing with me—you better finish the mind puzzle in time to claim what’s left of your respectability.”
She wanted to smile, but she knew he was possibly being serious. He was usually a tad more respectable than that for all his bad boy talk, but his emotional neediness knew no bounds. His remarks were sufficient motivation in any case to find her way to opening the rest of the Chinese lockbox puzzle he’d created for her. What they weren’t was an invitation to call, “Game over!”
Despite his button-pushing comments, in lieu of her troubled childhood and her particular history, she chose to ignore them. He knew the price he’d pay for doing that to her back in the real world, and she didn’t think he would be willing to pay it. Even as a voice in back of her head warned her otherwise. It was just another test, of how much she could trust him, and trust herself when it came to knowing who to trust.
He disappeared as he sensed her returning her mind to the problem at hand.
What was she missing? She’d done as much as she could with her scanners and her mindnet-scouring prowess. There was nothing left to do now but relax into this alternate future. See if by living inside it some more, running through its VR paces in her head on fast-forward if the application of imagination would be enough to fill the missing holes.
She braced for the artificial-gravity ship’s touchdown. Her entire body hardening with her grip on the handrail before the window. She felt as if she’d been turned to a pillar of salt, staring at either Sodom and Gomorrah or perhaps the Medusa’s head.
Once the ship landed, its touchdown cushioned by the transwarp engine that had it in its grip easing up, she relaxed her hold and breathed more easily.
A few more moments of wide-eyed wonder to take in the new world from her changed vantage point, and she donned her spacesuit and let herself out of the vessel.
Once her feet were on Martian soil she could feel the energy coursing through her body cranking up as the location of the latest planetary energy grid booster worked its magic. The nano in her body was definitely responding in a positive way.
About the time she’d decided this would be a pretty cool alternate timeline to live in after all, the mirage dissolved in her mind. Right when she was walking an energy vein leading straight up Olympus Mons. The brisk-paced hike working her muscles in the lighter gravity. Even the cloying nature of the spacesuit, the claustrophobic feeling it gave her, faded before the sheer exhilaration of climbing a mountain several times higher than any on Earth.
And she was back inside the gym, being Gumby-doll stretched by Gecko, who did look like he was engaged in slow motion lovemaking with her, like some esoteric martial arts kata they were performing together. She wasn’t even sure which idea floating through her mind at the time of her nature walk on Mars had unlocked the prison box of the mind.
Corona looked up and away from him as he centered both of them and brought them back to a static position analogous to the one she remembered leaving him in.
Across the mats in the loft space, several partners were sparring using “the force.” Blasting each other with Chi energy. Hard enough to send one or another of them flying into one of the padded walls. Or to pin them to the ceiling. Most of the time they would come out of the spin in midair only to land some distance back from where they’d been telekinetically thrown.
Others were practicing manifesting items out of the void to throw at their opponents. A level of skill far more advanced. As that required channeling chi specifically enough to isolate the wavelength of zero point energy and to use it to convert pure energy to matter, and then to concentrate well enough to manifest what you liked. Usually a solid object. Manifesting a living being was far too advanced for anyone in this room, perhaps anyone on the planet, as of yet.
“Care to play?” Gecko said, nodding towards the fighters.
“I don’t have that kind of specialized nano running through me.”
“Ah, but I do.”
“What am I supposed to do besides get beat up?”
“Your nano has other ways of protecting you. I’m sure you’ll learn as you go.” His proclamation came on the heels of his sending her crashing into one of the male fighters, who didn’t seem to mind. He smiled and “brushed her off” a little too helpfully as he helped her up, mostly to maximize his groping of her.
“Sorry,” she said to her unwitting victim.
“Anytime.” He was quickly lost in his play with his opponent.
Something was nagging Corona about Gecko’s mind-prison game. What about it was supposed to help her exactly with the next attack on Nova? Short, of course, of thinking fast under pressure. What was the blind spot in her defenses that he’d exposed?
She should probably have spent more mental energy surviving his latest torture game than continuing to play the last one out in her head. Being as she was getting bruised up pretty badly with all the throwing against the walls and tumbling on the floor.
The Martian sim had revealed a single person behind all the madness, not a corporation, not a hive-mind affiliation of citizen scientists, or any number of far more likely suspects.
Did Gecko suspect a single person to be coming after Nova? Why? Did he just want her to consider the possibility? It was a self-empowerment age that made it possible for any one person to change the course of history, and not in some additive or combinative kind of way. In a paradigm-changing way. They were still in a decided minority, but they were out there. Was that what he was trying to open her mind to?
It might well be, considering he had been working on morphing both of them into that top one percent of the top one percent. They called these folks H.G.E.s, Hosts to The Genesis Effect. It wasn’t enough to affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, to be a small giant among men. There were those who wanted to affect the lives of billions. And for some, even that wasn’t enough. No one’s life could remain even remotely the same after their consciousness blew over the land; that was their goal. That was the definition of what it meant to be in the top one percent of the top one percent.
Corona had hoped such egomaniacal thinking would melt away in a more egalitarian age. For most it had. But the ones with the Messiah complex remained. The planet seemed to refuse to suppress the genome. They might indeed serve some purpose in the present. But she tended to think of them like those dinosaur reenactments in Central Park. As many anachronistic throwbacks to the past.
She was now too sore to contemplate any more of the Mars Sim. Her self-healing was holding up, but just barely. Her lower level nano was sufficient to restoring her body to a hundred percent after a good gym workout, but she had never planned to be a martial artist. So it wasn’t like her lower level nano was all that exceptional, especially as pertains to body maintenance.
Corona used her jacked-up nervous system to dodge his energy blasts. And she dialed up her range of vision so she could see the boluses of chi energy coming out of Gecko’s palms, from the center of his spine, where the seven main chakras were aligned. She couldn’t do much more than that, but now that she was more present in the moment, she wouldn’t be taking any more hits. Gecko smiled and released her from the “workout regimen” he’d designed for her.
“Took you long enough,” he said.
“Yeah, well, I was a little preoccupied.”
“Be here now, baby. It isn’t just Zen, it’s survival. If you can’t neutralize present dangers in real-time, you’re done. You don’t get to go home and study up on how to do better next time.”
Her rationale exactly for pushing the edge with her neuro-nanococktails. Realization number two. It wasn’t enough to keep her neuro-nano cutting edge. If she was going to have second rate wound recovery nano. But no one could afford to load up on every safety tech out there. Not even paranoid-about-safety-issues little her. Maybe that was the point of this latest lesson. Don’t get too comfortable with her problem solving prowess. Some problems, even if solved, don’t have instant solutions if you don’t have instant access to the necessary resources. And no one had that.
Accessing the mindnet brought you close to instant solutions to most any problems, even if you had to borrow the solution from someone else’s mind on line because you couldn’t think it up yourself. And the internet of things could speed that solution to you in the tangible world if it itself was a tangible object that you needed. Uber for 3D printers, just like Uber for driverless aircars could print on demand anything you needed within spitting distance of where you were located, even if the design solution was halfway around the world. The mindnet and the globally dispersed network of 3D printers could pretty much narrow the gap between problem and solution to next to nothing. But that was still plenty of time to die in as Gecko was getting fond of pointing out.
Could she really do without him? Or was she fooling herself? Nova relied on her for his survival, but she clearly relied on Gecko. Maybe the three of them were stuck in a ménage-a-trois for life, like it or not. Gecko wouldn’t mind. The instant he got near Nova he’d start pitching Nova on shapeshifting nano so he could make himself female and bisexual just to shore up the tightknit ménage-a-trois. She giggled at the thought until her laughter got away from her.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You think I didn’t put that thought in your head?” He shook his head slowly in disappointment. “Sometimes I think his naïveté is wearing off on you.”
She gave him a wicked smile. “Poor Gecko. Always manipulating to get what he wants because he doesn’t believe anyone will just give it to him.”
Corona raised her voice to the room. “Hey, one of you exercise geeks materialize me a towel so I can dry off?”
A towel materialized, which she grabbed out of the air, wiping her armpits as she strolled out the gym exit. She caught Gecko’s perennially pining-for-her expression in the reflection of the glass doors as she passed through them. His rueful smile swallowed up buckets of sadness. He was the hunky one. It must have done a number on his mind to try and figure out why she’d go for the admittedly just as handsome but much leaner Nova.
ELEVEN
“Where have you been?! I can’t believe you left me all alone like this!” Nova was practically screeching at Corona as she entered their humble domicile adjacent to the army of formerly homeless, all living modestly on their UBI checks. Perhaps not so modestly, she thought, considering most were living better than Kings of old just fifty years ago, in a time without many kings, mind you.
“Melodrama much?” She sighed and threw her airbike on the ground which folded up to suitcase size and then scurried under the bed for safe-keeping. It looked to be running from the two of them arguing.
“Um, excuse me, but we have determined that the entire world is out to get me! And don’t split hairs with me. If the entire world can be hacked, it doesn’t much matter if there are just a small number of people in it who want to do me in.”
“Relax.” She grabbed his face with both hands and forced him into a kiss. “Gecko and I have determined whoever it is, is really after me.”
“Is that so? That does lift a burden off my shoulders.” He continued his frantic pacing and gesturing, and nervous fidgeting, rubbing his hands over one another. “Losing you will be hell, I’ll feel like I am experiencing the tortures of the damned, but I will survive. You on the other hand… Got to appreciate the irony of trying to stay uber-safe only to find out it’s the perfect formula for uber-fast-tracking to an early grave.”
He stopped dead in his tracks. “And just what were you doing with Gecko, exactly? I’ve seen that guy. Dim the lights another notch, and I’d want to do him. I’ve seen the type. They walk into a lesbian bar and walk out with a woman on each arm. They walk into a straight bar, and walk out with a guy on each arm. It’s not fair. And he doesn’t even have that pheromone thing-a-ma-giggy. Really, I have more insecurities than I can handle right now.”
“I think you need me to fuck you into unconsciousness.”
“Well, duh.”
She laughed a silent laugh as he melted into her arms. He wrapped his legs around her waist, seeming to accommodate more each day to the fact that she was the strong one. “Wait, what happened to the light show?”
“I walked into our home and you were PMSing—kudos by the way, not too many guys know how to do that—and I just decided I had enough of the light shows. Your skin is back to normal. The nano I injected into you with my kiss is self-dissolving, so no need to lose any sleep over them causing potential havoc inside you.”
“I still feel so violated.”
“Trust me. Another twenty minutes of lovemaking with me and you’ll find out what violated really means.”
“Oh yeah? Promise.”
Corona multitasked necking Nova with looking out the window at the encroaching tidal wave.
“You feel stiff all of a sudden?” Nova said, confused. “Is it me?”
“Yes, dear, I’m taking on all of your tension.”
“You do love me! Take on some more from my lower back, will ya?”
She telelinked to the airbike under the bed, which crawled ou
t on cue, attached itself to a few other suitcase crawlers, until there were enough LEGO blocks to make a submarine for two.
“Honey, why is there a submarine in our living room? Oh, never mind. Could you just keep plunging my hard dick into you?” He was letting her do all the work of not just supporting his weight at her waist, but lifting him into her. “Let’s hear it for neuro-responsive clothing, huh? Who wants to feel for a zipper during times like this?”
She walked him up the steps to get them inside the sub, putting him at the perfect vantage point to see out the window, something she was too busy with other things to consider. “There’s a tidal wave rushing towards our house!” he shouted. “And you’re managing me? I’m not some baby to be burped over your shoulder!” He belched unwittingly, and then vomited at the sight of the monster wave getting ready to swallow them whole.
Corona continued their descent into the submarine, patting him over the back and saying, “There, there.” Fastened him in, took over the controls about the time their house was swept away.
“I haven’t even cum yet!” he complained.
“You’re right, I should have planned this better.”
They both felt the surge forward as the wave caught them up. “I hate weather wars!” he croaked. “How do you fight a wave? And by the way, we’re miles from the shore. It would take a meteor the size of the one that wiped out the dinosaurs impacting the earth for that much water to reach this far inland.”
“That does appear to be what happened,” she said, studying the sub’s dashboard scanners and surfing mindnet at the same time.
“No way! I know they crash comets into Mars all the time for water. But to get an asteroid past Earth’s asteroid defense system…”
“It’s a Level 4 hack.”
“It’s a Level 4 hack,” he said mockingly. “Of course it is.” He thought about it. “Wait a second, you’re telling me Level 4 can handle a meteor strike! We’re talking coastal cities across the Pacific…”
The God Gene (Age of Abundance Book 2) Page 10