“I have the book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in my head, loaded on my mindchip, thank you very much. So I have perfect recall of it. And what I can tell you is that it only works when the person feels up to the challenges, the gap between skill level and what’s required to do well at a task isn’t too great. It doesn’t work with David and Goliath scenarios, where you just feel so outclassed you can’t even get the hyperdrive of your mind engaged that allows you to run it at warp speed. You know, like when a person comes up against level 9. Besides, I don’t know what I enjoy that much besides fixing wounded creatures.”
Gecko laughed. “We’ll be able to make something of that in the days ahead. Assuming we last days as opposed to hours or minutes.”
Nova stopped arguing because it was just depressing everyone again by making everyone realize how hopeless it all was. The simple fact was, he was going to have to figure out how to enter flow state against an ubermind, whatever the odds. He was going to have to push fear out of his mind completely competing against a consciousness that would know how to trigger his worst fears that he didn’t even know he had.
To motivate himself he thought of those people who lifted cars off of their loved ones after an accident on sheer adrenaline and force of will—no nano-infusion required. They did it, somehow. One in a million of them did it, anyway. And they didn’t have a god gene gestating within them.
One in a million odds was more than he had going for him a moment ago.
NINETEEN
Why was she dreaming about this stuff? Corona had put these people out of her mind long ago. They were figures from her foster-home revolving door childhood. So called brothers and sisters, moms and dads, uncles and aunts, all who saw her as a sex object first, or as a personal slave/servant or perhaps as a whipping post. She’d gotten around all these pervs by turning the tables on them, by being better at getting under their skin than they were at getting under hers. She’d hack her way into their neural nets, turn them into her puppets.
And so the daddy who wanted to use her as a doll, who kept her in his doll collection, and only brought her out to play when he was home… he got his.
Her body had remained paralyzed as she sat on the shelf with the other dolls until he got home. Then he would pretend to activate her, “wind her up” by fingering her snatch. Or worse, stick his hand up her to use her as hand-puppet.
But she bided her time well sitting on those shelves. She may have lost control of her body thanks to him hacking her neural net with superior tech—he always managed to foster kids with less-updated neural nets to the one he had—but she used that downtime to scour the planetary mindnet and every inch of cyberspace for what she wanted. He’d failed to close off that loophole to her either because he hoped she’d follow him around all day and download herself into the other dolls he kept around him at work, and in the car, because that’s what traumatized victims with hostage syndrome did, feed into their abuser’s fantasies. He was so used to making her say things he wanted her to say, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, that she had no doubt he imagined she was following him around. Every time he’d make one of the dolls at his work or in the car say something, he could easily imagine it was her talking back to him.
One day, returning from a hunting mission in cyberspace she’d finally sacked and brought back what she needed. A get out of jail free card, a way of hacking superior neural nets, stealing what it was about them that was nexgen and porting it back to her own neural net. It would come to save her from more than the doll maker. But first she had to get away from him.
She hacked his mind so he would never know she’d been inside his head. Instead of feeling violated, he felt overcome by guilt. And so started confessing to anyone who would listen, his boss at work, the guy at the fast-food counter, the woman walking dogs for a living, the detective in charge of child-perv crimes.
His boss flipped the switch on him in his office, so his confession went out over the factory floor. The factory workers did some last minute tweaks to the robots rolling off their assembly lines. By the time the doll maker made it to the exit, walking one end of the factory floor to the other, every robot on the assembly lines, not yet boxed, was chasing after him. They would never stop coming.
Later he would find himself surrounded by them in prison. Yes, robots that committed crimes went to prison too, right alongside human criminals. And the factory robots, hell bent on making him pay, saw to it that they got locked up right alongside the doll maker by committing whatever crimes they needed to. And so he had one as a bunkmate who forever smiled at him ominously, and cracked his knuckles. Several as guards in the prison, one even as the warden. All there to make sure he suffered worse than anyone else in prison.
But before he got to prison, he had to survive the beat down he got at the fast food restaurant when other people, waiting in line to place their orders, heard his confession. “I paralyzed my seven year old daughter so I could finger her twat like a windup doll. Make her say things like, ‘More, daddy! More!’ And so I could put my whole hand up her snatch and use her as a hand puppet.”
He didn’t exactly make it out of the fast-food place alive. The other customers, men, women, children, old ladies, a few pet dogs, all got their licks in.
But Corona had included another hack to her father’s mind-chip and nano net. The ability to forever reanimate him so he could heal just enough to take more punishment. So he crawled out of the fast food joint and spent the night in the dumpster healing.
When he confessed to the lady walking her dogs, she unleashed the hounds on him. They tore him limb from limb and went to bury what parts they didn’t finish eating. That meant pieces of the doll maker, forearms, calves, feet, hands, a head moving by way of its tongue, all had to find their way back together again from the far reaches of town. But find their way back together they did, and what did the doll maker do when he was finally whole again? Why, he went to the detective in charge of perv crimes at the police precinct and confessed, of course, reciting the same speech he did in the fast food place.
The office full of desks and cops went ballistic. The officers beat him so bad they had to close the precinct for the day just to mop up all the blood. It was on the walls, the ceiling, the rotating overhead fan—upon which a piece of liver had landed—and inside their desk drawers. The perps, handcuffed at the time, they got their licks in too, apparently to the satisfaction of the cops who ultimately undid their handcuffs and released them for social services rendered.
Of course, hiding the evidence by sweeping and mopping him into the dumpster outside and calling for an early morning pickup from City Sanitation, didn’t really solve the problem. The body, once delivered to the landfill, eventually re-agglutinated, even from under all that shit, mounds and mounds and pounds and pounds of it. Ultimately crawling out, very zombie-like to make his way back to the police station that had reduced him to chunk meat.
By then the police were feeling very apologetic for losing control like that, especially as, from a cooler headed point of view, they appreciated the idea of him spending the rest of his life behind bars, figuring he’d gotten away too easy the first time. So they promptly carted him off to prison where instead of awaiting a sentencing trial his paperwork would be manipulated to show that he’d already received one and the verdict was ten consecutive life sentences to be lived out one after the other with whatever life-extension technologies necessary to make it happen.
Of course, before the police could get him to jail, the robots that had been sent after him earlier got to have some fun with him. Crashing his paddy wagon with a semi. Forcing him to crawl out from the crushed vehicle, just so he could hop on a police-escort motorcycle and speed off as he was taking gunfire and knives to the back. The wounds would heal, of course, but they would hurt like hell in the meantime.
The high speed chase on the bike was carried out by robots on other motorcycles giving pursuit. They would bump his bike with their tires, sending him flying through t
he air so violently that he’d skid his bike, peeling the skin off his leg, or roll the bike, taking even more of a beating. Or the robots would cause the bike to flame out by damaging the gas tank, and turning him into the flaming man. One time the robot pursuers nudged him so hard on the bike that he landed to be run over by a sixteen-wheeler.
The doll maker crawled up, all the worse for wear, only to be hit by the ambulance that had been called in to take him the rest of the way to prison. The chase bots, decided they’d take a break from their fun as the paramedics slipped him on a gurney and put him in back of the ambulance.
They gave escort to the ambulance until it took him to the prison infirmary, where some of the other robots that had been reprogrammed on the factory floor that fateful day also worked as medics. There they could torture him by injecting chemicals into him and with their various apparatuses all in the name of reviving him. His screams piped over the prison house P.A. system to help lull some of the more inveterate prison types like himself to sleep.
The doll maker was the worst Corona had ever lived through, but he, like the rest of her abusers, was cut of the same mold. Her “brother” Ethan had suggested she join his wrestling team. It was coed because, well, with nanotech-infused bodies, there was little need to separate the sexes anymore. But he had more than fair play in mind.
He overrode her nanonet when he was wrestling with her to show the other team members what to do with an unruly sister. His torturous rape, combined with painful wrestling holds and pins meant to stretch her out in a “good” way lasted nearly an hour with the others in a circle clapping and watching.
When she finally counter-hacked his neural net with tweaks to her original download that had worked so well on daddy, the doll maker, “brother” Ethan spent the rest of the day being gang-raped by the rest of the team, whose neural nets she also penetrated. She’d let him off easy because he hadn’t managed to get under her skin for nearly as long as dear old doll maker daddy.
Then there was Grouper, another of her “brothers.” She might have stayed with that family all of two weeks; she honestly couldn’t remember. Even with her nanonet she could choose which memories to hold on to and which to let deteriorate. Needless to say, this was one she’d thought she’d dissolved in the ethers of the past long ago. But he resurfaced again, explaining why he had to tie her up, arms spread wide overhead, so he could whip her. He needed to develop the strength in that arm for archery, and the fact was, his fingers were too sore to wield the bow any more. Surely she could understand.
She had little choice but to understand until she could hack her way into his mind using yet another tweaked formula to the one that got her around doll maker daddy. The algorithms had to be adjusted each time because as she went from house to house, she faced siblings and relatives with more advanced nanotech than she had. Of course, since those early days, she’d learned to make the algorithms self-evolving so they could continue to refine their Houdini skills without her active involvement.
Seven days of ritual beatings later, and Corona managed to turn the tables on Grouper. She wasn’t sure how to punish Grouper for what he’d done to her. But until she could think of something better she sent him on an around-the-world journey on a schooner populated by gay men. His file said, “prefers to be whipped and mistreated in any way his dom likes.” And every time he opened his mouth, the words that came out supported that, despite whatever else Grouper might have felt about the subject. The price of his voyage had been paid for one year but a clause said that it could be paid for each following year by the ship’s owner if he felt his services were in high enough demand. Last she’d checked, Grouper was serving the fifth year in a row on tour around the world on that ship, so he must have been quite the phenomenon. She’d have to remember to cut him loose soon, providing she survived her own ordeals first.
There was something wrong with these recollections. Despite remembering how things had originally played out, this time, revisiting and reliving the ordeals, she was unable to turn the tables on her attackers. What it felt like to be their meat-puppets, what’s more, was more intense than ever.
Corona found herself tossing and turning in her sleep, aware that she was sleeping and dreaming, but unable to pull herself out of the dream. When she wondered why Gecko hadn’t awakened her to calm her, she realized she was dreaming the tossing and turning part. She was in fact caught in a sleep paralysis, unable to awaken and unable to move.
If this continued much longer she would lose all the value of the drama therapy she’d done on herself. Up to and including inviting Gecko and Nova into her life. They were the first boys she’d been with on her terms. Gecko because he reminded her of the psychic and sexual abusers of her past, but in a way that forced her to trust him to keep his darkest impulses in check when around her, and to always put them in service of her healing. He was the last and final test she’d given herself that her past was truly behind her and that she’d escaped it unscathed, except for the one crutch she continued to hold on to this day.
Even now, it was important to her to have access to tech more advanced than any of her potential abusers and to be forever on guard against them, wherever she might find them.
As to Nova, he was the most harmless man on God’s green Earth, if she could pardon herself the expression, coming as it did from an atheist. He was joy incarnate and endlessly playful and well-adjusted for all his pretended arrested development, and all the things she wanted in a partner. He didn’t mind her wearing the pants in the family, so he would never play control games with her the way Gecko did.
Gecko was her bridge to the past, Nova her bridge to her future and the kind of carefree ability to lose herself in the moment without the eternal vigilance of being on guard against potential attackers.
Whoever was inside her mind was undoing all her good work putting Humpty Dumpty back together again over the years. She was rapidly reaching a threshold of retraumatization that would cut through even her more adult coping mechanisms, which were so much more superior to the ones she had as a child. Making them useless.
Slowly she became aware of the Level 9 hack of her mind. Her sense of panic escalated beyond anything she thought even her enhanced body could absorb.
The self-evolving algorithms that had launched themselves in the face of Gecko’s many mind-prison games he’d subjected her to in an effort to bolster her own Houdini factor, came rushing out as she opened the Pandora’s box of her mind where she kept them hidden so no one could know what to anticipate, what to neutralize before they came into her head.
And that was how she pushed even Level 9 out of her head.
But she had to find a way back to wakefulness, past the paralysis she couldn’t shake.
That’s when she felt Gecko’s arms on her shaking her. Would he set her free yet again with more reverse psychology? Would the arms she could never break free from in a hundred years, they were so strong, be the thing that busted her out of the psychic prison Level 9 had locked her in? The breath of him, taking in his scent, earthy, musky, complex, was slowly bringing her around like Victorian era smelling salts.
TWENTY
Nova was the first to awaken. The earth was vibrating and there was a hellacious sound, like trees made when they lost a branch, only magnified many times over, and it was growing louder in tandem with the increasing earth tremors, which had now cracked the concrete Corona and Gecko were sleeping on—their arms intertwined, to Nova’s consternation. He went to the window in his hovel he knew wasn’t there, but the contacts would fill in the blanks for him. “Um, guys, I think we’re about to be hit by a tornado.” He turned, annoyed both by the fact that teens could sleep through the end of the world and the end of time both without awakening, and by the fact that the “little” disturbances caused them instead to cuddle closer together for warmth and security, a reflex in their unconscious state. “Guys!” he shouted.
Gecko, the first to awaken, and not in the drowsy, gunk-in-eye manner
that Nova was still in, but on full alert, shook Corona awake and pulled her to standing. She looked more confused and disoriented than anything, as if some dream still held her captive, or as if unable to remember where she had fallen asleep.
They were both at the window now. “That’s no ordinary twister,” Gecko informed them. “It will jettison us out of the atmosphere and into low orbit where we will die from the lack of atmosphere, radiation exposure, and the extreme cold, not necessarily in that order.” He shifted his eyes to Nova. “You’ll be the first to die, not having our upgrades. I suppose that’s some kind of blessing. Ironic, it is the transhumans who will suffer the most.”
Both their eyes returned to the window. “It could just pass us by,” Nova said feebly, even as the twister moved closer.
Gecko pulled his eyes off the vista and glared at him. “Please tell me you’re only pretending to be that stupid.”
Nova sighed. “Yeah, I guess I am.”
“You need your dick sucked to activate the god gene?” Gecko said. “Because honestly, I’m game.”
“I’ve hacked some of the smart skyscrapers in the vicinity,” Corona said, “the ones able to move out of the storm’s path if it’s more than they can handle. Should take some of the fight out of the twister. I’m guessing touching down in Kansas beats drifting among satellite debris, which would likely kill us even if we could cough up the necessary spacesuits.”
The God Gene (Age of Abundance Book 2) Page 19