The God Gene (Age of Abundance Book 2)

by Dean C. Moore

  “What are friends for?” Before she could give him any more lip, he dragged her out the backstage exit only the mortician knew about. Once they were in the unoccupied back rooms of the mortuary, he stopped dead in his tracks. “I’m not your only friend, Corona. The Sousveillance Society has taken a keen interest in your case.”

  She should have been flattered, but she wasn’t. The Sousveillance Society was based on a David Brin concept from his nonfiction book, The Transparent Society. The idea that surveillance didn’t have to work in an entirely top down manner. The surveilled could keep an eye on the surveyors as well, and on one another. A sort of everyone spying on everyone society. She wasn’t against the principle, in theory. But it was too paranoid for her tastes, too focused on the dark recesses of people’s minds. The group had spun off from Anonymous, attributed with liberating the ninety-nine percent from under the thumbs of an all-powerful oligarchy that had hacked democracy in America and in most every other country around the world. Starting in the 1970s, the oligarchy only grew more powerful with time, until they were finally brought down in the early 2020s, replaced by the supersentient ubermind, open-sourced, and created by the Unix types. Yes, the same ones who gave us Apache servers in their day and kept the internet free of portal-syndrome, with portals overseen by an elite minority. With the advent of the ubermind, all corporations of any threat to humanity were dissolved back into the public sphere. All those individuals involved with corruption and collusion against the people jailed for life, and every ill-earned penny they ever earned returned to the public sphere. And the rest was history.

  Anonymous, these days, contented themselves with bringing Deep Mind thinking to the average person. When G.O.L.E.M. had come up with the concept, it only existed in the cloud, as a rentable commodity for anyone who needed access to that kind of mind power. Anonymous didn’t much care for that idea. So they’d been working on nanococktails ever since that gave the same kind of deep thinking abilities to the average human. The nanococktails took metathinking to new levels. Instead of the two or three levels deep that some unupgraded intellectuals were capable of, thinking about their own thinking, looking for patterns, habits of mind that were self-limiting, and finding their blind spots, the nano-infused minds with Anonymous’s cocktails were capable of metathinking hundreds of levels deep. And they still had access to the cloud and to mindnet. Important because what was all that mind power without oceans of data to mine? It was decentralized power at its finest and at its most decentralized. If one wanted to secure democracy for all time, it was definitely the place to be working these days.

  Anonymous deserved their reputation as heroes as much today as then. But as gung-ho as Corona was with embracing a transhuman future, even she pulled back from these extremes. If Nova only knew; he wasn’t the only holdout from the future; in their own ways, Corona and Gecko were too. Perhaps they just weren’t self-loving enough to embrace this new era owing to troubled pasts. A problem for another time in any case. From the way she was getting lost in her head, clearly she hadn’t neutralized the viruses in her meatsuit as well as she’d hoped.

  “What has Sousveillance come up with?” Corona said finally, coming out of the black hole of her mind she’d slipped into, trying to manage in her tone of voice an ounce of appreciation and stifle any feelings of contempt.

  Pashdo smiled. “We’ve found the one that’s after you.”

  “The one?”

  “Yes, it’s someone Neuro-Tech divested themselves off quite a long time ago. And that was after they’d bought the rights to him from G.O.L.E.M.”

  Up until now, she was under the impression Neuro-Tech was part of G.O.L.E.M., one of its alphabet companies. “How do you buy the rights to someone?”

  “He’s not exactly human.”

  “An AGI like you?”

  “Not exactly. He’s Otto. The first Nano Man.”

  “His body is a nano cloud?”

  Pashdo nodded. “A self-evolving hive mind, using algorithms that are way ahead of what anyone else has been able to do, or perhaps dared to try. For fear of triggering…”

  “…a genesis effect,” she said, finishing his thought for him. A nano cloud that could devour the world to feed its own intelligence explosion. She had no doubt that companies were nonetheless working on taming and controlling just such a reaction, all the same. Smaller corporations perhaps with less of a well-known brand name to protect. Hoping to be acquired by one of the larger companies when their product proved safe. The perfect solution for colonizing space, say. For terraforming planets on the cheap. She wouldn’t even put it past G.O.L.E.M. to be funding the work, and just keeping ties to the company at a minimum for now.

  “You think the Nano Man could set himself loose on more than Nova; he could unleash himself on the world.”

  “This one just might as a last resort, if his plans fail. As best as we can tell…” Pashdo quieted himself at the sounds of footsteps coming their way. A lot of them. “They’ve found us.”

  “Who has found us?”

  “The Red Army. The Nano Man has hacked every soldier in every unit.”

  “No way we’ll be able to stay in these meat suits.”

  “It’s Beijing. Big enough to swallow up even the red army. Come on.” He took them out the back way onto the streets.

  The streets of Beijing were teaming with life. But there weren’t enough human roadblocks in all the world. The Red Army was comprised of nano-infused soldiers with off-the-charts reflexes. And once they got a lock on you, there was no stopping them. It was next to impossible to kill them, as they rapid-healed from lead bullets, laser fire, electroshock; they could survive drowning, prolonged hypothermia… Corona was running through all the ways that wouldn’t work to kill them on the mindnet as they fled down the street from the mortuary. So far she’d yet to find a way that would stop them. Then she remembered the body she was in. Nano viruses meant to bring down the nanococktail upgraded. Pashdo smiled as he saw the dawning of realization on her face. “You’re a good friend to have Pashdo.”

  “We still don’t have much time before these meat suits have outlived their usefulness.”

  Already Corona had had to put down dozens of Red Army urban acrobats coming at them from all directions, scampering down the vertical surfaces of high-rises as if gravity meant nothing, the skin on their soles nano-morphed to function like a gecko’s feet. Their gymnastic somersaults and vaulting leaps well past the limits of what unaugmented bones, muscles, and tendons could do without disintegrating.

  Several soldiers were running on the tops of people’s heads to get to them, their leaping movements so large they looked more like they were skiing downhill; others like they had frog-genes written in to their DNA. The viruses she was downloading into them were slowing them down well enough. Leaving screaming, agonized soldiers with chemical burns boring holes through them to their skin’s surface, or causing them to cough up their lungs, or collapse as advanced states of polio, leprosy, and cancer took hold of them in seconds. Other soldiers herniated so badly, their abdominal muscles fell into their scrotal sacs, stretching them to the size of pumpkins. But Pashdo was right. She only had so many viruses to throw at them. And eventually they were going to hack their way through them. Not these soldiers, the ones back home, the desk jockeys who once they had the hacks in place could download them to the unaffected soldiers, or even to normal everyday citizens, piloting them the way they piloted drone aircraft back in the day, by remote control.

  “The Nano Man isn’t actually trying to kill you,” Pashdo said.

  “Could have fooled me!” Corona gasped out. If she was having trouble keeping her breath stable at running speed, Pashdo’s meat suit looked like it was going to cough up a lung. She had to assist him more and more to keep on the move.

  “He’s trying to awaken the god gene in Nova.”

  Even from her state of heightened vigilance, checking every nook and cranny for dangers, she managed to glare at him long enou
gh to convey how mad he sounded.

  “He’s trying to activate it! We’re trying to activate it to survive him! Ah, that’s the game he’s playing. Should have seen it for myself. Gecko is going to be pissed, playing so many mindgames with me to no avail. The whole point was to teach me to recognize another player’s style well enough to sense his strategy and his end game.”

  “I’m afraid of what happens if Nova fails his tests,” Pashdo said.

  “So far we’ve only been able to partially activate the god gene, and we’ve yet to get even limited responsiveness under our control.”

  “The Nano Man won’t stop short of full scale activation of the gene. He needs to know how to fully activate it in everyone.”

  “Even for one person, that would be insane. Far less a world full of those people.”

  “He’s convinced it’s the only way to safeguard humanity from oppression. I’m afraid his line of thinking is entirely in keeping with your own. ‘The only real safety is to be one or more generations of tech ahead of the other guy’.”

  “I was a Buddhist before I was an atheist,” Corona confessed. “According to those guys, hell worlds do exist. And one of them is called the realm of warring gods. Assuming it’s possible to achieve heaven on earth by such means, first must come consciousness, then that kind of power. Not the other way around. He should be working with Anonymous. That’s the alliance he needs.”

  “I’m afraid he’s not open to debate on this topic. He’s more vengeance driven than enlightenment driven. He wants to get back at G.O.L.E.M. and at any champion of centralized power doling out enlightenment one spoonful at a time just so they can continue to stay on top of a pyramid structure that has no place in an egalitarian age.”

  Corona sighed and roared at the same time as Pashdo collapsed. He could go no further. She was applying CPR and electro-shock by way of her nanites to him even as she fought off the latest round of Red Army attackers. As the circle about her widened—the pedestrians afraid of catching whatever the fallen man had, but too curious to entirely walk away from the drama—the Red Army grunts made their way to the front of the circle. They looked like they were break dancing for her, but those weren’t exactly dance moves. She turned them on one another instead of zapping them with nanoviruses. She wanted to keep some of those in reserve for coming up against the Nano Man. The last thing she needed was for all of her formulas to be hacked before she finished the job. The audience clapped, thinking the fighting soldiers were part of some martial arts demonstration in hopes of promoting nanococktail sales precisely for turning you or your kids into ninja gods.

  “You’re going for him, aren’t you, the Nano Man?” Pashdo said.

  Corona nodded.

  “I’m not so sure that’s the best idea. Maybe this is a battle you should let him win. Maybe Anonymous has upgraded enough civilians with Deep Mind algorithms to handle the consciousness necessary to give rise to the god gene.”

  “Somehow I doubt it.”

  “I’ll do what I can to keep an eye out for you in cyberspace,” Pashdo said, fading.

  “Where is the Nano Man?” she said, shaking him conscious.

  Pashdo opened his eyes one last time. “I won’t tell you. I won’t send you to your death.”

  “Damn it, Pashdo!” Corona released his body, and shortly after left her own meat suit on the street beside him. The Red Army lost all interest in the two people lying on the ground. As they backed off, that created room for the paramedics to do their work. Both the meat suits were reviving. The woman anxious to get back to her family. Asking for them. The man, lying on the stretcher, being carried into the ambulance, keying away on his virtual keyboard hovering above him, happy to find his bank account stuffed with a few million dollars where earlier it had been overdrawn.

  SEVENTEEN

  Corona had no sooner hopped into cyberspace than she started her hunt for the first Sousveillance operative she could find. “There are millions of these guys, Corona, how hard can it be?!” She glanced at her avatar and noticed that it was no longer a swarm of red vipers. Every color in the rainbow was presented, each one a different hack. It was no doubt the Nano Man’s doing, siccing the ubermind on her for being a rogue AGI. She had more identifying targets on her surface than ever, symbolized by the markings on the red snakes. The glowing dots on the snakes made them look nearly phosphorescent. Her cyber body was failing her. She died in here, she had real problems. She needed another meat suit and fast. But mostly, she needed her own body back. Without it, she couldn’t do what she did so well.

  She found one of the Sousveillance types, despite the mindnet routers she was speeding through doing everything they could to slow her down and misdirect her, trying to get her to confuse the voices in her head with their voices for where to look next. She thought twice of turning him into a meat suit, considering how paranoid these guys were about being hacked, but she had no choice.

  His mind was too well fortified. If she could gain entry, it would be no easy feat to get to the truths he was hiding. Just her luck this one was Deep Mind fortified to boot, with 154 layers of meta-thinking capacity. Anonymous would have been very pleased their Deep Mind initiative was being embraced to this degree by the Sousveillance types.

  Corona hacked her way through from the topmost layer of meta-thinking. Each level down had no defense against what was happening above it. She kept drilling her way down until the guy was staggering about his workspace as if drunk. His lab partner, his twin, working in the same garage with him, said, “Shit, what’s wrong with you?” in aborigine. The two middle-aged aborigines were living and working underground, somewhere in the outback, in a latticework of cave dwellings to protect them and their equipment from the oppressive heat on the surface.

  Squeezing his upper arms, his twin brother stared into his eyes, like some shaman of old, determined to soul-read him and what spirits were possessing him. Considering their culture, the gesture was all the more ironic. The twin was actually trying to hack his brother’s mind with his own nano-infused mind. Apparently, even as paranoid as they both were, they allowed one another greater access to each other’s minds so they didn’t have to sacrifice their twin-like psychic connection. “It’s Corona. Relax little brother, it’s Corona.” His brother’s eyes went wide and he smiled, despite not being able to shake the drunkenness. “What is it you want, Corona?”

  “I need to find the Nano Man,” she said, but it came out as garbled speech. This guy even had his speech centers locked down. And he was stumbling around drunk because Corona couldn’t sufficiently hack his motor cortex. She was impressed. He was even more hack-proof than she was. There was something to be said for being a chip off the old block of the uber-mind.

  Corona tried to scribble what she wanted to say, but she did no better getting sufficient control of his fine motor skills. Considering her meat puppet could barely stand, that was probably a given, but she was getting desperate.

  “You must want to know where the Nano Man is,” the Twin said. “What else?”

  She couldn’t even nod in the affirmative. “He’s in the penthouse of the Aniruddh building, in Bangalore. Wait! You’re going to need more than one meat suit to come up against him, I don’t care how good your hacking skills are.” He showed his twin the picture of the man with half a face. “The Nano Man did this to someone he liked.” He ran the video forwards and backwards until she hoped she got the message.

  By now she’d hacked her way through enough of his twin’s defenses to manage a nod. And then she was gone.

  “You alright, brother?”

  The recovering twin nodded. “We never considered a top-down hack before.”

  “We did, but it was already the most bulletproof layer, the most all-seeing dimension of the mind. How can you make it more bulletproof except by creating another layer, which will in turn be vulnerable to…”

  “Yes, turtles all the way up. It’s too important a problem to keep to ourselves. Get the word out to
Anonymous and the rest of the Sousveillance groups.”

  “You know what this means?”

  The sickened twin nodded. From his expression, the admission cost him dearly. “We have to hive-mind with the others, to provide security for one another. I guess we’re going to have to get over our self-imposed isolation, big brother.”

  “We’ll see how long it takes for the hive mind to plug the holes exposed by Corona’s hacks. Maybe that will be the reassurance we need to join up with the cooperative.”

  His sick brother nodded. The well-brother hugged him, helping to support him, as they reached out to the collective, curious as to how long the Sousveillance society would take to get his sick brother back on his feet.

  ***

  The female agents were swarming the Aniruddh building in Bangalore, lit up at night like a crown jewel. Corona figured the female agents had the best chance of getting past the largely male security staff. Countless Davids with their lithe figures in body stockings to the countless Goliaths, ex-football player types, ex-Sumo wrestlers, ex-any-giant-they-could-get-their-hands-on. But the bulky men were likely to move more slowly in response to taking a threat from female attackers seriously. Time enough for her ladies to get the better of their male opposition. Corona had hacked police officers, security guards, martial arts instructors, Buddhist monks, Hindu priests, athletes, college students, anyone she could get her hands on that might be of sound enough body to be of use to her with minimal hacking. She had downloaded ultimate fighting combat aptitudes to all of them, mixed martial arts, anything that actually worked. They were also proficient in whatever weapons they could get their hands on, meaning they really didn’t need to bring any.

  She had violated her moral code bigtime just to get this far, coopting this many individuals and their personal freedoms and albeit-false-senses of security and turning them into meat puppets. But she was hoping empowering them to help her rid the world of the threat of the Nano Man would be peace offering enough. Should the truth about him ever come out.