The God Gene (Age of Abundance Book 2)

by Dean C. Moore

  ***

  “Well, that scene was a total wash for synchronicities,” Nova confessed. “I hope you’re happy.” He directed his comment at Gecko. “You can save me the ‘I told you so’s.”

  Gecko smiled weakly. “That’s okay. I got to observe your ‘being’ thing first hand. You were very right with the world in there, very at peace, totally lost in the moment. Without seeing what you were talking about, it would simply have been a theoretical abstraction I thought I understood, but didn’t really.”

  Nova gave him a hard look. “Didn’t think my psychic reading of you was that dead on, guess it was.”

  “Psychic reading? Cute. Don’t you mean your ‘female intuition’?”

  Nova folded his arms defensively. “What did I say about provoking me?”

  “You’ll have to take a raincheck on the payback.”

  Nova didn’t like the sound of that. Didn’t sound playful at all. And the fear in Gecko’s voice didn’t sound directed at him. “Why?” Nova said.

  “Because we’re under attack.”

  SIXTEEN

  “What do you mean we’re under attack?! It’s a beautiful day, the sun is shining, the breeze blowing. I should have a bumper sticker on my forehead that says, ‘I should be sailing’.” Nova turned his attention away from the downtown metro’s park setting. It was a serenity alcove. The smart-trees, the smart-grass, the smart-shrubs, the smart-lake, all conspired to drown you in brainwaves that were calming, centering. All in an effort to get stressed out city folk back into flow state where they did their best work, into the zone of peak performance. Often the overachievers would get so carried away with their work for so long that not even their body’s nanococktails could set them straight and undo the damage of pushing themselves too hard twenty-four seven. So the serenity park handled that for them. Part medical triage. Part outdoor Zen monastery. Needless to say it was a far cry from Robo-Retroville, which seemed all but a distant memory now. While Nova could experience none of the relief from overworked neural nets, the park looked enough like a traditional park for him to enjoy it all the same.

  The never-let-them-see-you-sweat strategy maestro, Gecko, had summoned their getaway ship from the spindle in Robo-Retroville where he’d parked it, and had it ready to go, parked inside the garage that was also the set for the gambling den of inequity. In advance of the alleged attack. After warp-driving them out of their cartoonville digs to their present location for the purpose of enhancing their ability to work under pressure, so far, from what Nova could tell, this attack was just in Gecko’s head. Or perhaps another one of his mind games. They’d long since disembarked the ship and sent it on its merry way back to Uber.

  “Nova!”

  Upon glancing at Gecko and Corona, he got an inkling of why Gecko sounded so stricken when shouting his name. Corona had collapsed in his arms. She was convulsing and frothing at the mouth. “Why’s she like that? Tell me!”

  “Solar flare. That’s how I knew we were under attack. My neural net shut down.”

  “Why didn’t hers shut down back in Robo-Retroville?!”

  “Hers is more advanced than mine and she’s more dependent on it.”

  “So, fix her!”

  “I can’t. She’s already dead.” Gecko sounded devastated, just not devastated enough for Nova’s liking, or for him to trust what he was saying. Though Corona had ceased her twitching, and her lungs were no longer moving. She looked plenty dead enough for this not to be one of Gecko’s sims. Even if she believed she was dead enough for her systems to shut down like that, there would be some residual activity. Nova took her from Gecko’s arms. He was too stricken to put up much of a fight. The best he could muster was a “What the fuck?” look. “Can’t you see I’m grieving?” It only slowly dawned on him that Nova was grieving too.

  Nova could feel the warmth leaching out of her body. His own body temperature was up along with his sense of panic, but she could not draw heat from him fast enough to hide the truth.

  He looked up at Gecko accusingly. “You have some way of bringing her back, right?! That’s why you’re still standing and not some crumpled mess.”

  “I can bring her back, yes. But it won’t do any good unless…”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless she escaped into cyberspace in time.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “She’s a substrate-autonomous person. Means she doesn’t need her meat suit. So long as she’s in cyberspace she can find another body. She can hide out wherever she needs to until we can get this body ready for her to return to.”

  “Tell you what,” Nova said meanly, “we’re going to go with that for now. Now help me carry this body to where you can fix it. You’re stronger than I am.”

  “We don’t have that luxury.” Gecko pointed to the clouds overhead. They had turned menacing, and most ominously of all, taken on the appearance of giant human faces. Evil ones. Nova wasn’t just having a Rorschach moment. Someone had hacked the weather system. Someone not without a sadistic sense of humor.

  Gecko snatched Corona from Nova’s arms and rushed Corona’s body to a robo-recycling truck collecting garbage up along the running track, at the edge of the park. Threw her inside, a little too unceremoniously for Nova’s liking. He went to punch him out and Gecko just grabbed his hand and froze it where it was. I can regrow her a new body in less time than it takes to fix that one. Only, we have to survive a Level 7 ubermind attack first.”

  “Level 7! What happened to levels 5 and 6! I just survived a Level 4 hack not too long ago. There’s a natural progression to these things!”

  “You forgot, you yourself predicted that our nemesis would come at us when all the levels of the ubermind were sufficiently preoccupied to offer inadequate defense. Level 6 monitors the sun to ensure no solar flares damage the ubermind itself, or any part thereof. The fact that mindnet is down in this sector tells you it was hacked.”

  “How the hell does the ubermind keep the sun in line?!” As soon as Nova had voiced his frustration, he realized that the sim Gecko had put them through with the space battle taking place just outside the Earth’s atmosphere may not have been as farfetched as all that. The ubermind may indeed have quite a few contingencies in place to deal with extra-earthly problems.

  Gecko shook his head at Nova, tired explaining things to this simpleton, especially with the Cloud Face bearing down on them. It was a fiery orange against a darkened sky. Several hive minds had already been thrown at it to slow it down. A massive flock of starlings moving in beautiful ever-shifting fractal geometries, and as one, until the fiery face consumed them. As the cloud got closer, Robo-fire hydrants adorning the park burst open and doused the face not just with water, but with ever-shifting chemical concoctions they were able to procure on a dime, all designed to out fires raging at different temperatures. One of the smart willow trees growing by the river in the park whipped the nano cloud face with its tendrils, leaving slash marks that healed readily enough. The tree would have been sucking what intel it could about the hive-mind dynamic of the nanites making up the cloud to see what had gone wrong with its cloud seeding, meant to neutralize gathering storms, not exacerbate things.

  The collective effort—suggesting Levels 5 and 6 were involved with Gecko’s and Nova’s defense as best they could, their intellectual resources too overly tasked to attempt much more on Gecko’s and Nova’s behalf—weren’t working. He would need Gecko to clarify whether or not both levels 5 and 6 were involved, depending on how much of the ecosystem feedback loops were involved, just the park’s, or just the city’s, or just the northern hemisphere’s, or the entire planet. But Gecko wasn’t talking. He was dragging Nova by the arm. “Don’t you start with this taking me by the arm nonsense. I get enough of that with Corona.”

  Gecko wasn’t paying him much mind, just counting on his superior strength to move Nova about like a rag doll as necessary until Gecko got a handle on things. Nova was curious to see how he was going
to do that without his neural net in play.

  The fiery face finally fought its way through the last of the firewalls, had its widening jaw around both of them, when Gecko held out his hand, palm up, and zapped it into oblivion. “What the hell?”

  “The force.”

  “As in Star Wars? No way! You’ll have to show me how you do that sometime.”

  “I’m guessing your god gene trumps anything I can do channeling chi energy. Speaking of which… What’s it going to take to activate it? Seeing your girlfriend die in front of you not enough of a trigger for you?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Not now. We’re kind of preoccupied.”

  “Why are we running from the other cloud face coming after us? Can’t you just do to it what you did to the last one?”

  “’Fraid I shot my wad. Whatever’s propelling those nano clouds, I just don’t have the stamina to go toe to toe with it again this soon after the last round.”

  “Then grab my hand tighter and run faster!” Nova tripped a couple of times. Should have landed on his face. Gecko was just too strong. Instead he found himself intermittently airborne until he could get his feet under him again.

  Nova screamed when he saw Gecko disappear. He felt abandoned and violated. But the invisibility cloak kept spreading until it engulfed Nova as well. Gecko’s neural net may have been down, but he must have come ready-stocked with enough nanococktails to serve a variety of purposes besides supercharging his mind. Nanites on his skin evidently gave him a cloaking feature and could replicate themselves fast enough to cloak more than just his body. Perhaps they were powered off the entire EMF spectrum, explaining why they had power aplenty even under the darkened sky.

  The fiery face chasing them looked frustrated. It stopped, gazed about, blew over trucks, cars, dove down through the sewer system and back up again, determined to find where its prey had gone. When it got really pissed off, it incinerated everything within sight, just in case they’d managed to morph into one of the land formations. Or just in case they were being hidden by an invisibility cloak. By then, Gecko had exhaled some nanomists of his own. Their self-evolving algorithms had a go at hacking the cloud faces’ hive minds. Not just the one originally looking for them, but the final remaining one hanging back in the sky that had dipped down to assist its partner when Nova and Gecko had totally disappeared.

  Gecko’s hive minds did the trick. The cloud faces disappeared.

  “You did it! You did it!” Nova screamed with glee.

  “I don’t think so. It was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was Level 8 of the Uber-mind interceding that did most of the work.”

  “Level 8? I didn’t think anyone got its attention.”

  “That’s because you don’t want to get its attention. It informs level 9. You get Level 9 coming after you, there’s no unfucking that situation.”

  “How do you know Level 8 got involved?”

  “My neural net is back up, and the mindnet’s back up in the entire quadrant, and…” Gecko turned to the robo-recycling truck slowly driving by. Waiting for something to happen. Corona hammered her way out of the truck, which healed itself before driving on. She ran over and hugged Nova and Gecko.

  “You’re alive!” Nova said. “How can this be?”

  She shook her head, dumbstruck, then met Gecko’s eyes. They both said together, “Level 8.”

  “How do you know!” Nova screamed.

  “Neither of us have self-healing capabilities like that, not with our neuro nets down. Not even with them up, at least I don’t. Gecko might.” He chose not to confirm or deny that realization, just held his poker face.

  “You know what that means?” Gecko said to Corona.

  She panned her head to Nova to explain. “Level 8 defenses include nano we’re infused with that we don’t know about. So it can shut us down if it’s the only way to stop a runaway reaction.”

  “And if Neuro-Tech has been keeping an eye on current events, it knows too,” Gecko said.

  “That violates the constitution! The Geneva Convention! The Expanded Human Rights Act that runs to two thousand pages!” Nova stopped shouting and mumbled the rest, “Don’t you love the Age of Abundance? In the Age of scarcity I think it barely filled a page.”

  Continuing in a self-deprecating vein, Nova said, “But, hey, no worries, I’ve got this god gene going for me if I can ever figure out how to activate it when I want it activated instead of when it wants to activate itself.”

  “I have some ideas about that,” Gecko said. Nova didn’t care for the way his voice sounded. Gecko shifted his attention back to Corona. “How did you make out in cyberspace?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “I do actually. There may be clues there for how to survive the next attack.”

  She shook her head slowly. Just recalling what she’d been through sent a chill up her back that caused her to spasm.

  ***

  With her neural net failing under the sustained solar flare, Corona fled into cyberspace. She wasn’t there long before self-evolving algorithms were coming at her from all directions. Her avatar, comprised of red slithering snakes swarming over one another in the form of her idealized naked body, fought off the self-evolving algorithms attempting to take her over, represented by lime-green vipers. No matter how fast she ran, the vipers, poised to strike from their roosts—the glowing transistors providing their warming heat—were faster. She would lose this battle if she stayed inside mindnet’s circuit boards, computer chips, anodes and diodes long enough.

  She sent out a self-evolving algorithm of her own, freeing one of the red vipers from her body to search out meat-suit avatars. Its job to assess the best possible candidates and to learn from other hackers which methods of taking over the body were most effective in which circumstances. A person didn’t have to be dead to be hacked and turned into a puppet. She’d prefer to avoid such actions on moral grounds, but if it came to that, she needed to make sure she didn’t get counter-hacked.

  There. Beijing. Nice, crowded city. No way to move on her with large scale attacks without compromising too many people and pissing off the ubermind worse than with anything she was contemplating.

  A funeral. The woman lying in the coffin was plain but pleasant looking. In her late thirties perhaps. Her nano-infested neural net was still firing, mostly thanks to the nanite cocktail in her brain. She’d died because the nanites had been unsuccessful warding off the countless nano viruses she’d been exposed to, secondary to working in an off-book nano war bureau.

  The coffin was partly open for the viewing. Corona animated the body, neutralizing the nano viruses that its previous owner was unable to stymy. She sat up to gasps in the audience.

  She crawled out of the coffin, hugged the sobbing, hysterical mother, nearly a head shorter than she was. The mother looked into her eyes and said, “Who are you?”

  “I’m on the run from a cyberattack from unknown parties.” The crowd, on the verge of rioting, confused, angry, betrayed, not sure how to react, settled on her words. There were nods of understanding rising above the din of people grieving in ways as unique as wildflowers running rampant over a meadow. She explained to the mother, “I can get your daughter back though, once I’ve made it to safety.” She raised her voice so the rest of the packed room could hear her. “I’ve already neutralized the nano viruses that killed her. They were from a red army unit experimenting with population control.” A fair amount of the crowd didn’t wait to hear anymore. They were already heading out the door, like an Indian war party all painted up, but from the inside, with what their blood pressure was doing to them. God help that red army unit. They didn’t need directions to find it, as they’d already hacked her mind for them, a hack she hadn’t resisted. “I promise I’ll get your daughter back to you,” she said, kissing the top of the brokenhearted woman’s head.

  Corona was looking for an exit that wasn’t plugged by the exodus in progress when an arm reached
out and pulled her aside. An even more homely Asian man than the woman whose body she inhabited. She could ancestry-track to his birthplace by analyzing a hundred and one tells. But she stopped herself. It was considered garish in this know-all age. “Corona, it’s me. Pashdo.”

  “I actually thought you were a rogue AGI.” Artificial General Intelligences, analogous to humans, only smarter, were crawling all over the web. Their numbers still small and manageable, like viruses you could neutralize but not quite stamp out. They weren’t supposed to be there at all. The fear was too great that they could out-evolve people by too wide a margin. A good percentage of the ubermind was dedicated to stamping them out. But not everyone was sold on IA or Intelligence Augmentation as a way of securing the future. Many feared upgraded people were even more of a hazard to humanity, even with the ubermind to ensure everyone played nice. Some preferred a top-down approach. They conceded that governments and corporations working on AI or artificial intelligence—the top-down approach—was definitely a bad idea. Too easy to get caught up in an AI war where humans were the losers. But individuals, on the other hand, working in an artisanal fashion like the artists’ guilds of old, could conceivably craft artificial life that was made of all the right stuff, more human than human, who wouldn’t go off on some maniacal quest to conquer the world. And if they were wrong, well, one or more of the other AGIs would put an end to it, or the ubermind would.

  “Actually, I am an AGI,” Pashdo said. “I hacked this body, same as you did, only, this poor bastard was alive and just trying to balance his checkbook at the time.”

  “Pashdo!” Corona’s tone conveyed her shock and condemnation over the impropriety.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure his checking account bugs his eyes out when I’m done with him. I was the one that led you here. I was one of the green snakes that hacked your avatar, and the self-evolving algorithm you sent out to find the best possible meat suit.”

  “Thanks, but I could have handled this on my own. Now you’ve put yourself in danger for me.”