The God Gene (Age of Abundance Book 2)

by Dean C. Moore

  Their strategy seemed rather effective, at least in these early days of the war, where the Davids could be bullied and bashed and pummeled into oblivion. Leaving the AGIs no choice but to flee into the bodies of the goliaths, lending them even more morphing ability as their now superior intellects applied themselves to the problem of survival and morphing the lower-order, “less-evolved” nanites at their disposal, the ones designed more for morphing ability than intelligence.

  It was the fact that the goliaths weren’t beyond a little in-fighting that proved the greatest challenge to Nova and his friends. Moving among wrestling giants who could squish them like steamrollers simply by rolling unwittingly over them was not a game for the faint of heart. Nova was starting to lose his voice from all the screaming he was doing each time Gecko manhandled both him and Corona out of the way. Gecko would have lost his grip on them long ago were it not for the way he took control of their smart-outfits to keep them from bursting at the seams every time he yanked on them. Nova wasn’t alone in his screaming. Hearing their screams against his, he was constantly being cued to adjust his scream to a more manly register, at least to something between Gecko’s and Corona’s. Perhaps all the practice was for the best.

  The AGIs that had infiltrated the smart windows and smart streets and sidewalks were evolving the war to suit themselves as well.

  Bottomless quicksand pits could be any patch of roadway or sidewalk one stepped on if one weren’t paying sufficient attention.

  Smart windows that one might get thrown against didn’t just shatter and heal, they sent the victim through a portal, probably just rapid dissolving them to nothing or dust on the other side, like a chipper-shredder working at a much more minute scale using nano teeth. But for all Nova knew, maybe the smart windows had become portals to Narnia. It dawned on him that even though the AGIs’ intellects might not be that superior to say the smartest unupgraded humans, the Teslas and Einsteins of old, they might be specialized enough or “gifted” in a certain area to procure a bit of technological magic ahead of their time.

  Gecko used his bodyguards, the fire hydrant droids, to neutralize the quicksand pits the threesome unwittingly stepped in by firing nanite sprays to gum up the nanites causing the ground to liquefy, solidifying them enough that they were able to get across before the countermeasure was itself neutralized. The fire hydrant droids did the same to the windows when one of their charges, either Gecko, Nova, or Corona, was picked up by one of the Goliaths and flung against the expanses of glass. If the fire hydrant droids could react fast enough, the sprays, aimed at the goliaths, caused them to scratch themselves as if overtaken by fleas, dropping Nova, Gecko, or Corona, whoever they’d gotten their hands on.

  The situation well enough in hand for now, Gecko said to Corona, “How are you making out in cyberland? Anything worth reporting?”

  It hadn’t even dawned on Nova that she might actually be multitasking her way across this impossible battlefield!

  TWENTY-THREE

  Corona 2, the first avatar Corona sent into cyberspace—at the behest of Gecko who recommended she crowd the attacking AGIs out of her mind by creating some of her own—was playing a complicated game of hockey with her team mates. Her team mates, in this case, being her long-term cyber-geek friends she had meant to hook up with sooner, except for, well, all the mayhem that had taken place that had come between them.

  The game was being played on the rings of Saturn. The players using their hockey sticks to bat one of the meteorite “pebbles” out of its spot in orbit into one that was just right for it on one of the rings. The opposing player’s team, meanwhile, had to anticipate the rock size needed to fill the original void made before the “puck” landed and fill it with one of comparable size. Many balls could be in play at once across many rings. The players, of godlike size already, could resize themselves accordingly to make the shot, but no one could use their self-evolving algorithms to boost their level of play beyond that. That was cheating. The relaxing ritual kept their minds centered on more important matters.

  “So anyone have any idea how we unscrew this pooch?” That was Dariel, one of Corona’s transgender friends. There were a lot of versions and definitions of transgender these days with shapeshifting body nano increasingly commonplace. Dariel chose to remain both sexes at the same time, with a vagina, and a clitoris draped over it as big as any dick. Her breasts hard and diminutive enough perhaps to satisfy any sexual preference. Or at least other post-genics, the ones no longer solely identified with either sex. She also had a bit of an Amazon build about her in real life; her avatar was no different.

  “We might be able to hold our own against these bastards for a while if we can get the Sousveillance camps to hook up with Anonymous. Together, they might be able to hack enough of the AGIs to get them to change sides, so we’re defending a piece of mindspace say the size of Alaska instead of the size of Hawaii.” That was Minotaur. His avatar was seven years old, blond and blue-eyed, and for all Corona knew, that’s who he was in real life; she’d never met him in his meat suit.

  “Works for me,” Gabriel said, batting his “ball” into the hole made by Dariel. So far neither team had placed the shot just right, or hit the right-size ball into the right-sized hole, so the scoreboard reflected minus points on both sides, running neck and neck.

  “We want to keep the AGI people pitted against one another rather than against us,” Corona 2 said. Her avatar, for this encounter, looked like an airbrushed Olivia de Berardinis pin-up poster, down to the tiger stripes running up and down her body. The artist’s popularity had only grown over time; it didn’t hurt that someone had figured out how to bring her back from the grave with DNA-resuscitation techniques. “If they link up the way we can link up our minds they’ll be that much more powerful. They’re already exploring ways of coupling. We don’t want to give them a common enemy and thus an excuse to combine to a greater extent just so they can come after us. Meanwhile, we work on taking our mind-interlocking games to higher and higher levels in anticipation of the day when the gig is up.”

  There were grunts and nods of approval across the field, from both teams of players.

  “What about the Deep Minders, the ones with a hundred fifty-four layers of meta-thinking going on?” Dariel asked.

  “They’ll play at being Socrates and Plato, debating the ins and outs of various countermeasures until hell freezes over. They can afford to stay on the sidelines for a while, if not for the duration with their fortified minds. The human versions of medieval castles come to life.” That was Minotaur again. Probably their master strategist. He had a lot in common with Gecko, only it was hard to say what Minotaur’s issues were exactly.

  “And what of the god gene?” Gabriel said. “Any chance of activating it now?” Gabriel’s avatar had wings, just like the arch-angel he was named after.

  Minotaur snorted. “Zero. Not with this much distraction. You’re talking about a meditation on what goes on inside us at the deepest, darkest level on par with the Chinese sage who gave us a map of the energy body and the science of acupuncture to go with it. Maybe if the war wasn’t going on. Maybe if any of us had a second of downtime.”

  Corona cut in. “We’re heading off-world with Nova, at least that was the plan last time I talked with Gecko. The Nano Man seemed to think Nova was our best hope for activating it. Maybe away from the madness here on Earth…”

  “Maybe,” Minotaur concurred, hitting a perfect hole in one for the first time, and jumping his team on the board to a positive score, the first team to accomplish that.

  “Whatever happened to the Nano Man anyway?” Gabriel asked.

  “He broke apart into the countless AGIs now overrunning cyberspace and meat-space both. Hell of a parting gift,” Minotaur said. “Payback’s a bitch. I doubt G.O.L.E.M. has learned its lesson. Probably still trying to figure out how to capitalize on this situation with a vaccination that keeps the AGIs in check.”

  “Strange,” Gabriel said. “It’
s an egalitarian world the Nano Man got, but not one that’s any more enlightened. It’s as if the Age of Abundance and the Age of Scarcity, once separated in time, have now come together. The AGI-people will never have enough mental real estate to keep them happy. Their psychology is all Age of Scarcity. But they have Age of Abundance tools at their disposal to spread themselves through the heavens like a black plague.”

  “Unless that god gene gets activated in time,” Minotaur said batting another hole-in-one. And sending the scoreboard reeling on his side again. “What are you still doing here, Corona?”

  Corona 2 nodded and bowed out.

  ***

  Corona 3 materialized on the moon, or its cyberspace equivalent. The beach party was in full swing. “Swimmers” were jumping into low orbit to frolic in the low-G pool before doing cannonball dives into the dust below them. Laughing all the while. “High divers” were using trampolines or the rims of craters for that extra hang time. Either no one told these fools that moon dust was comprised of glass shards, or going for realism was secondary to having fun.

  Sven had his six-pack of brewskis and was kicked back next to his cooler on his patio chair, in his swim trunks like all the others. Not surprisingly, he was sporting the sharply cut physique of perpetual college-aged youth. His blond hair, blue-eyed look was positively Swiss. He was watching the volleyball game from “poolside” with his binoculars. That was a pretty big volleyball court courtesy of the low-G that accommodated a much wider field of play.

  Other partygoers were playing Frisbee with one another or with the dog. Some beach frolickers, too drunk to play anymore, were getting high staring at Earth on the horizon. “Still looks pretty good from up here,” one of them said. Several in earshot sniggered, toasting his remark, in no hurry to rejoin the hurly-burly on Earth.

  Corona 3 took her seat beside Sven on the empty patio chair next to him. “Hey girl! Was wondering when you’d show. Figures the world had to end first.”

  “What are you fretting about? The entire planet is now one big virtual reality shooter game, only in meat-space. It’s like you die and go to heaven, the moment you exit cyberspace for meat-space, anyway.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. I’ll make do, better than most. My girlfriend, not so much. And her parents, not at all. You ever try to have sex with a traumatized girlfriend in the middle of grieving the loss of her parents while still in a state of shock over her own fate? The whole thing feels too pervy to me to really get into.”

  “So here you are, staring at the Earth, waiting for a revelation?”

  “Something like that,” he said, taking another swig of his beer.

  “I’m leaving Earth, Sven.”

  “Really?” He did a double-take her direction. “But you’ll leave an avatar behind so we can still have our thing on the side, right? Especially now that sex isn’t exactly looking up with the girlfriend.”

  She was fighting back the urge to smack him and still couldn’t stop smiling. “I’m already in a ménage-a-trois in meat space.”

  “Techa, how early-twenty-first century. You sure you don’t need a drink?” he said, handing her a beer.

  She laughed and popped open the beer and took a swig.

  “Seriously, girl, you can’t leave me with permanently PMSing Janey. Her idea of a shoot-em-up is an arcade where you fire the rifle at the bottles to win a big fury pink teddy bear.”

  “Very big of you really to date someone from an antimatter universe to the Tour-of-Duty world you live in.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  She laughed and swigged her beer. “Maybe leaving behind an avatar of myself isn’t such a bad idea.”

  “I’m glad you’re finally remembering my high scores in cunnilingus.”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of if Gecko, Nova, and I need a way back to Earth and we can’t open a portal from the other side of the multiverse, or wherever we end up, maybe I can open it from this side.”

  “Speaking of portals, babe.”

  She smiled a tight-lipped smile. “Give it a rest, Sven.” She sipped her beer and put her mind to addressing his problem. She’d forgotten how self-centered fighting for survival every second of every day could make you. “Why don’t you break Janey in slowly to the Tour of Duty world Earth has become with overlays? Get her so she’s good at winning the carnival arcade booth games and step by step…”

  “Techa, that’s genius!”

  Techa was geek speak for “Tech Gods.” The atheist-dominant faction of transhumanists of which Sven was a part needed something to say besides “God help us” every five seconds, so they went with “Techa help us,” which was sort of like paying homage to themselves, as they were the ones inventing the tech that was slowly turning people into gods. She’d become so used to bandying the term about herself that she often forgot about its origins. Sven was the one who’d first gotten her using the term.

  “She’s just got the contacts for AR?” Nova said.

  “Augmented Reality by way of contact lenses, can you imagine? Techa preserve me.”

  “I’m guessing now’s the time to talk her into a nanococktail neural net. That way she can deny reality all the better. Meanwhile, you can hack her nano-infused neural web without her knowing to give her the coping mechanisms she needs, without overriding her personality, Sven. That last part’s important, okay?”

  She thought privately, “How far you’ve come in your own healing, Corona, to even suggest such a thing, considering your childhood.” But one of the trials of growing up was learning to read people better, knowing when to keep her defenses up around them and when to drop them. Who she could trust and who she couldn’t. Who could do real harm, if left unchecked, and who would always rein themselves in. If she couldn’t master that, she’d remain forever the traumatized child, never able to deal with the present moment without baggage and without prejudice, forever bound by the chains of the past.

  “Yeah, yeah!” Sven said. “Absolutely that’s the way to go. And I promise I’ll resist the temptation to turn her into a sex doll. If that’s what I wanted, I would have gotten something off the shelf and modified it to my demanding specifications already.” He leaned over. “All right, kitten, gotta go.” He kissed her on the lips. “No time like the present to save her from herself. Unless of course you’re amenable to a quickie?”

  “Go have fun with your girlfriend, Sven.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that.” He kissed her again and disappeared mid-kiss.

  Corona sighed and sipped her beer and contemplated the jewel of a planet that didn’t look any less spoiled from up here. “A world without ubermind protection?” she thought. “Without the will of the most enlightened minority of souls encoded into supersentient intelligence? To ensure an egalitarian age for all, which distributed all technological largesse to the multitudes fairly and equally? No embodiment of the godhead to watch over the mortal coil.

  “If the transhumanists were right, and there was no god, then they’d sure done a damn fine job creating one in the form of the ubermind to look over them the day they put an end to transnational corporations.

  “And now that god was gone.

  “And the struggling souls on the planet now wouldn’t even have the primitive gods of old to pray to for comfort.

  “How could utopia, or the closest thing to it in real world terms, turn to dystopia in a heartbeat?” She guessed she knew the answer.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “How are you making out in cyberland?” Gecko asked Corona. “Anything worth reporting?”

  “Yeah.” She downloaded everything she’d experienced in cyberspace, unabridged, for him, the way he liked his information. So he could sift through it himself in case there was anything she missed. The only tampering she’d done with the feed was to eliminate Sven from the picture, because she didn’t need Gecko or Nova tripping over him right now.

  He nodded. “Good. Couldn’t have masterminded a way out of this mess
better myself, Corona.” He hugged her and kissed the top of her head. “Come on. We need to get outfitted before we head off-world. Just have to stay alive until then.”

  “Get outfitted?” Nova noticed his voice retained that lingering squeaking sound to it despite his best efforts, like maybe a mouse gene had hacked its way into his voice box.

  Gecko snorted. “What, you think you were going to survive off-world for long without evolving further? Until you get that god gene activated you’re going to need far more advanced tech circulating inside you than you have. Than any of us has.”

  “Ah, just what’s that going to do to the god gene?” Nova asked sheepishly.

  “Good question. I’ll stew on it as we make our way to where we need to go.”

  “And where’s that?” Nova asked.

  Gecko pointed to the horizon. Nova followed his finger to the Neuro-Tech building.

  Nova sighed. “Guess that figures. What doesn’t figure is how we’re going to get to it. In case you haven’t noticed, the war is going on in a perfect circle around that building. The only clear perimeter is on the inside of the circle, and we’re on the outside.”

  “And what does that tell you?” Gecko glared at him and smiled impishly.

  Nova got the wheels turning in his antiquated brain finally. “Whatever they’ve got, it’s holding the AGI people at bay, for now.”

  “Let’s hope it’s an Anonymous and Sousveillance hold out. Command central,” Gecko said.

  “And if it isn’t?” Nova squeaked.

  “One unwinnable battle at a time.” He grabbed Corona by both arms and brought her into him. “One last kiss for the road, babe?” He didn’t wait for an answer, just kissed her.

  “Hey! That’s my girlfriend, mop face!” Nova said in a squeaky voice. He grabbed his throat, massaged it, and managed a throatier, manlier, “Hey! That’s my girlfriend, mop face!”