The God Gene (Age of Abundance Book 2)

by Dean C. Moore

  Nova’s eyes went wide. He remembered their house security. The droids could shapeshift enough to cocoon all three of them. But she was right. A tornado that powerful would likely rip the suits right off them, if it didn’t throw them against some surface so hard they became no more than coffins. And if by some miracle they did make it into space, the space debris hurtling at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour would bore right through them, turning them into Swiss cheese long before their oxygen ran out. And they thinking they’d come prepared for any end of world scenario.

  The ambulating skyscrapers looked like giant LEGO-robots; it was quite possible that’s exactly what they were, courtesy of corporate diversification. They slugged it out with the wind until they were sucked into the tornado. One by one. Still they kept coming, like brave sentinels refusing to abandon their posts. “Apparently there are some downsides to Level 9 taking its mind off the roost,” Gecko mumbled.

  Corona let out a pained cry. “Level 6 shut me down!” she gasped, rubbing her temples. “Just took a little longer without as much of the higher Levels at its disposal. Much of the world running on autonomous mode has now fallen on their shoulders. How’s that twister looking, Gecko?”

  “Like it’s still every bit as hungry after gobbling up your skyscrapers.”

  “There were a lot of people inside those buildings,” Nova said, giving Corona a hard look.

  “I like their chances better than ours. Those apartments they inhabit have airlocks. They’re rated for crash landings underwater or in the upper atmosphere.”

  “When did it get cheap enough to build anything to those standards?” Nova said shaking his head slowly with disbelief. “Never mind, I don’t want to know.”

  “Time to say goodbye,” Gecko shouted as the twister got ahold of them. The noise so deafening, they pretty much had to lip-read him. The dome was ripped off of them first. A split second later they were following it into the air.

  The house droids flew after them, overtaking them so as to cocoon them before it was too late. It was Nova’s guess the others were appreciating, as he was, the, for now, comforting sense of being snug and secure in self-healing smart-polymers more flexible and stronger than steel. Their voices reaching one another through the com systems added additional reassurance to one another, however staticy the communications.

  “These suits won’t last long,” Gecko informed them. “They weren’t rated for this.”

  Nova was going to give him a lecture on appreciation as a refresher when his suit was ripped right off him. He couldn’t breathe. Perhaps they were already too high up. Perhaps the force of the twister, churning from the upper ionosphere, was stripping the electrons of the oxygen molecules he needed for his body to recognize them as such.

  He felt himself losing consciousness. His final thought was a prayer of sorts, seeing the three of them in a protective bubble that could ride out the storm. He felt himself willing it to take form. But even with his pulse bounding so hard—he heard his heartbeat in his ears and felt it in the pulsing veins of his scalp—the god gene remained unmoved by his sense of urgency.

  When he came to again he was inside the cockpit of some streamlined jet skimming the upper atmosphere and sinking into a nosedive. His two compatriots strapped in beside him. “I did it!” he shouted.

  Gecko shook his head slowly. Speaking to Corona, he said, “Forever the moron. If I live through this I’m donating to the special Olympics, even if it is mostly robots that have outlived their usefulness.”

  “We were still conscious when it happened,” Corona explained. “The Nano Man cocooned us after we’d become separated, then brought us all together as he assumed this shape.”

  “Guess he’s playing for our team now,” Gecko said to Nova. “Hoping to buy you time to get your head out of your ass. Appears as smart as he is, he still hasn’t figured out that there is no getting your head out of your ass.”

  “Why are we headed straight down? Or is that another dumb question?”

  “Not really. The subject has been occupying our attention for some time now,” Corona said. She screamed like a kid after a rollercoaster took a nosedive when their rocket-plane burst through a layer of far denser air, accelerating further.

  “That’s a Level 9 server farm,” Gecko said, studying the viewport. “Not a bad strategy crashing us into it. Knock out Level 9 and the world becomes a nursery for the god gene. The lower 8 levels just keep throwing things at you until you grow powerful enough to be immune to any of it, giving you the time you need to grow into yourself. The Nano Man has already proven he can hack the lower 8 Levels without Level 9’s protection.”

  Nova strained his leg and arm muscles against the floor and arm rests respectively in an impotent effort to break against the fall. “But don’t we have to survive this first?” Nova said feeling himself losing control of his voice again.

  “Yes, all the more problematic when you consider that his vessel is nuclear powered.” Gecko pointed to the dashboard.

  “So, it’s essentially a nuclear bomb when used like this?” Nova sighed when no one answered. “Guess even I knew that was a rhetorical question.”

  When it dawned on him, Nova said, “Level 9 has got to have more than one server farm. I doubt one hit is going to do much to it.”

  “My guess is he can keep repeating this stunt until he’s done enough damage to buy you the time you need,” Gecko said, his voice even, yet conveying his sense of panic.

  “Blow us up and keep us alive at the same time?” Nova made a doubting Thomas face. “That’s a lot to ask even of his nexgen nano.”

  “Yes it is,” Gecko said, taking a deep breath. “But then he can afford to sacrifice us if your god gene doesn’t kick in to save the day. That’ll save him some resources.”

  “He wouldn’t do that,” Corona said reassuringly, squeezing Gecko’s shoulder from the seat behind him. “He understands the triune nature of our power. He wouldn’t weaken Nova, not even to activate the god gene.”

  Gecko chuckled. “Maybe he’s changed his mind on the matter. I do remember when he wasn’t trying to protect us. Let’s not pretend we can get inside the mind of a mad man, okay?”

  There was not much left to do but let the silence take them before the explosion did. Nova guessed they didn’t want to go out whining any more than he did, but chose to have a sense of peace and acceptance in their final moment.

  All three of them put their arm up to their faces reflexively at the point of impact.

  But there was no explosion.

  Instead there was something Nova knew instinctively was far worse.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “Where are we?” Nova said, his neck stiff from looking up.

  “It looks like Vegetation City, only it isn’t,” Corona said.

  Nova imagined her remark had to do with the ivies crawling over the skyscrapers, jutting out of the manholes in the street. The fact that every high-rise had a balcony with a miniature forest on it. Same for the rooftops. “Yeah, yeah. I remember interacting with my friends in AR, as a kid, that came over here. Popular with the homeless of all ages, because of the perpetual summer, and the fact that you never go hungry. The city generates more food than it can actually use. It’s a net exporter, if you can believe that. What else could it be?”

  “I can’t hack in to the mindnet,” Corona said. “I sense its presence, but the communication protocols are alien. So alien my self-evolving algorithms are getting nowhere against them.”

  Gecko, silently taking it all in up until now, with a grim look on his face, said, “It’s a parallel Earth. Rather than risk damage to one of its server farms, Level 9 opened a portal, a breach, to this place.”

  Nova gulped. He tried one of Gecko’s condescending digs, emulated it perfectly in his head, “You’re out of your mind,” but when it came out his mouth it sounded less than convincing.

  “That would explain the tough time my hacking algorithms are having,” Corona said. “But su
ch power! I thought it was confined to the corporate sector.”

  “Level 9 could have sent out an S.O.S.,” Gecko said, “explaining what it was up against. I don’t know, something like, ‘Help me, or see the god gene take over everything and everyone’. I’m guessing that would get corporate’s attention.”

  “There was a time when I wanted off Earth so bad,” Nova confessed, “I turned the mindnet inside out looking for teleporting technology. Found some interesting advances on the black web, ideas going begging for funding, but the risk of opening a black hole on Earth no one could contain was too great. So the thinking was to develop the spacewarping starship engines first, go set the thing up on some other planet, preferably in some far away solar system, test it there, then set up a relay of jumping stations that would give us access to the universe.”

  “Anything on the black mindnet is five years out of date or more,” Gecko said. “Especially for anything this hot. The real state of the art would have been kept off the mindnet, on corporate intranets, or even more likely, on solo computers kept inside of faraday cages.”

  “You can’t advance state of the art nearly quickly enough cutting even upgraded minds off from the group minds,” Corona argued back.

  “No, but you can wait until they progress the tech far enough that it’s ripe for the picking, then you bring it in house.” Gecko sighed one of those game-over sighs.

  “Okay, let’s say someone had the tech in place.” Nova paced and gestured both. “As if that isn’t already painfully obvious! The real question is, how do we get back?”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t.” Gecko emitted another soul-sucking sigh. “We’re safer out here. If we can get that god gene activated, maybe we can test it out in relative safety before bringing it back to earth like the black plague it may well turn out to be.”

  “Okay, riddle me this, Batman,” Nova said, “why would Level 9 just jettison us into some parallel universe where it can’t monitor the unfolding of the god gene for itself? Better the devil you know than the one you don’t. The very act opens Earth up for reprisal from afar against an enemy it has no defense against if we ever come looking for payback. Maybe we’ll activate the gene, give it to a planet full of human-grade or higher intelligent life forms and sic them all on Earth in an act of revenge.”

  “He has a point.” Corona’s tone was meant to penetrate Gecko’s defenses, his body armored and tense since materializing here.

  “Yes, he does,” Gecko conceded. “Corona, better keep at the mindnet. If I’m right, this planet hasn’t got long, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes. Level 9 may well have sent us somewhere it could snuff us out safely in less time than we have to activate the god gene.”

  “That’s a leap, isn’t it?” Nova said, his voice reaching a soprano pitch. “I mean, no less so than mine, but I get to go all gonzo on you guys because I expect to be shut down.”

  “Then where is everybody?” Gecko said. “The city appears deserted except for the plant life. Everything else is running on autopilot, and by early 21st century standards.”

  “What do you mean by early 21st century standards?” Nova asked.

  “I mean the city AI seems to have fled with the humans. Otherwise we’d feel her consciousness. The city would be less overgrown, better maintained, for one.”

  Nova had to agree, the city did look like it was in decay, and while the locals might not have gone in for the overly-manicured Vegetation City look, this kind of wildness was counterproductive. Hard to drain a flooded city when you’ve got the sewer lines plugged with ivy roots.

  “I’m in,” Corona said. Nova could tell from the familiar tone of self-satisfaction that she meant she’d just hacked her way into the alien mindnet.

  The city shuddered, maybe the whole planet.

  All three of them found themselves flat on their backs on the ground. “As I was about to say,” Corona said, “the sun around which this planet orbits, is being sucked into a black hole. Both bodies are being pulled apart. We have hours at best. The transhumans on this world fled long ago.”

  “We need to know how they got off this world,” Gecko said, “and if there’s any chance of following in their footsteps.”

  Corona shook her head. “Their supersentient AIs built their interstellar ships for them in little or no time at all. But the transhumans took those AI superintelligences with them.”

  “God gene it is then,” Gecko said, shifting his attention to Nova. “We just have to stay alive until the wizard learns to play with his wand to make the magic happen.”

  “That shouldn’t be hard,” Nova said. “Staying alive, I mean, as to the rest of it…”

  Gecko pulled himself to standing first and helped the other two up.

  After they’d been walking a while, Gecko said, “Strange Nano Man didn’t come through the portal with us. I’m sure Level 9 would have considered him enough of a threat to oust him as well.”

  “Maybe he has a plan B,” Nova suggested. “Maybe someone else he’s cultivating the god gene with.”

  “Maybe,” Gecko mumbled.

  Corona’s eyes went wide. “No, something else. Before he disengaged from his meat suit, Pashdo said, “Don’t leave earth behind just yet. It was almost as if he foresaw this moment. Whenever we played each other, he was always good at mental chess and thinking hundreds of moves ahead. He knew we would be tempted not to return to earth.”

  “Damn right,” Gecko said.

  “He downloaded something to my self-evolving algorithms,” Corona said. “I didn’t pay them much mind until now. I was too busy to give them the mental energy they deserved.”

  “You got nothing better to do now,” Gecko said. “The next few hours are gravy for us. It’s our boy here feeling the heat of leapfrogging the transhuman era to take his humanity into the posthuman age without going through the typical metamorphosis.”

  Corona continued walking with a glazed over look in her eyes, presumably as she worked on Pashdo’s coded message. Gecko kept her from tripping on the overgrowth of roots that had taken over the city streets. He was so attentive to her, Nova doubted she could have navigated the road better by paying attention. Nova liked seeing him in protective mode. He was generous and kind and gentle. A far cry from that snooty side that often came out under pressure.

  When Gecko went to lift her in his arms for a second time to get her over a root that looked more like a fallen tree, it was she who grabbed hold of his upper arm and squeezed to signal she was back. “We really do have to get back to earth and now.”

  ***

  A SHORT WHILE EARLIER

  At the point of impact with the Level 9 server farm, Nano Man’s solidified form in the shape of a nuclear powered private jetliner gave way. The resulting explosion threw the dust cloud that was his nanites into the air. They rose as part of the mushroom cloud, feeding and proliferating off the energy. It wasn’t a true genesis effect; he would remain forever impotent in that respect. At the end of the day, he was woe to admit that even he wasn’t state of the art anymore. As to the nanotech that was capable of generating a true genesis effect, if it had been perfected, he’d never know. It was too well guarded behind the sacrosanct walls of G.O.L.E.M.

  He would have to content himself with this pseudo-genesis effect. It was more than enough for his purposes.

  Otto wasn’t finished pulling himself together in the aftermath of the explosion just yet.

  For that he needed to summon the rest of his nanite body, distributed among those deliciously beautiful skyscrapers he forever loved to meditate on from his patio extension of his penthouse at the summit of the Aniruddh high-rise. He knew he said he didn’t know how to be that procreatively prolific to Shreiber. Shame on him; the poor man had paid such a dear price just to have his mind blown, and that surely would have helped to blow it further. He deserved nothing less than the whole truth. But the whole truth didn’t serve Otto at the time. It served him now, though. As he readied for his next move on the gaming
board, he wondered if the timely release of the whole truth about his actual nature would serve humanity just as well.

  ***

  PRESENT TIME

  “Why the rush to return to Earth?” Gecko said, still denying the inevitable.

  “It’s Nano Man’s plan B. If he couldn’t activate the god gene, he had another way to exact his retribution. He’s unleashed a packet of self-evolving algorithms that has turned anything running specialized AI into AGI.”

  “Someone explain to me what she just said!” Nova squawked.

  Gecko sighed. “Most devices have way more computing power than they need. Even a simple streetlight or smart window. If any of the group minds need an occasional spike of computer power they can utilize the idling, unused mental energy of these or any number of devices connected to the planet’s mindnet. But sadly, there is enough room throughout the entire system for AGIs—artificial general intelligences on par with you and I—to populate through the entire system. If they did so, they would outnumber the humanoid population, even the robot and hybrid populations.

  “If Otto triggers a Cambrian explosion of life among the AGIs, they won’t be born into an age of abundance as we were, they will be born into an age of scarcity, hungry for more software and hardware to play with. The most obvious people to steal it from are those that are most mobile, most dexterous, who can build things with their hands, the humans, the robots, the hybrids.”

  “You’re talking civil war,” Nova said.

  “Yes, on a planetary scale. And by my reckoning, the AGIs should win handily,” Gecko said.

  “You telling me there was no one guarding the hen house!” Nova screamed.

  “Level 9 keeps a close eye on keeping this scenario from playing out,” Gecko explained. “But she would have been vulnerable at the time the portal opened. So I guess you could say this is our fault, or to be really shitty, your fault. You’re the reason humanity may actually go extinct. Looks like, one way or another, you get to be a destroyer of worlds.”