Convergence_ The Time Weavers

by Dean C. Moore

  “Welcome to the ninety-nine percent, Ethan. It’s not pretty. It’s just who we are.”

  “You’re not going to tell me any more are you?”

  “Like I said, first I build you up, then I tear you down.”

  “You and my ex-wives been talking?”

  She choked off her grin.

  They’d finally made it to the ground floor. The open-air stairwell just spilled onto the tarmac. And she’d parked strategically. She opened the car doors for them with a press of her remote.

  “How could you be twenty-five and have not one but two ex-wives?” she said.

  “Just because I’m not a transhumanist, doesn’t mean I’m not precocious in other respects.”

  THREE

  Ethan whistled as he climbed in the self-driving Jaguar four-seater convertible, admiring the dash and the interior. Passing his hand over both. “This is nice.” The plush leather brushing up against his skin was as close as he’d come to sex in a while.

  “Uber-supplied.”

  “Seriously?”

  “You want the car you want, where you want it, when you want it, who you gonna trust?”

  He sighed. “Certainly not the Chicago PD storage depot. Point taken.” He reclined to nearly horizontal. She swiveled on her seat to him, as the car took off to the preordained destination. She’d obviously told it where to go before getting out to avoid ruining the surprise she had in store for Ethan. The wind-blown look on her didn’t exactly tone down the distraction of her looks. So he closed his eyes.

  “Will you stop?” he said opening his eyes and throwing a look her way. “I’ve been shrinked enough for one morning. By my refrigerator, no less.”

  “I didn’t tell you to get on the couch. You did that without any prompting from me.”

  “What you gonna ride my ass about this time?”

  “You get the mindchip upgrade like I asked ya?”

  “No.”

  “Ethan! How many times do I have to tell you, there’s an intelligence explosion going on in virtually every field of endeavor? Without being able to keep abreast of each and every one of them you can’t anticipate the points where they might converge. That means you can’t tell when they’ll create the unexpected, the ahead-of-its time breakthrough from the synergy. You can’t get inside the minds of the Convergence Tech Wizards, you can’t solve crimes, not the ones that matter. Not the ones that are going to get you the advancement you so crave.”

  “You early adopters are so easy to convince, so quick to jump in with every new thing. Downplaying the risks.”

  “You wait any longer to get a mindchip you’ll have leapfrogged the era entirely, jumped right into the nanococktail mind upgrades era!”

  “Nanites parking themselves between my synapses to moderate my sense of reality and fantasy until I can’t tell them apart? No thank you.”

  She groaned. “You’re such a Luddite.”

  “It’s part of our magic, babe. Coming at cases from opposite extremes, antagonistic outlooks, we’ve got every contingency covered. The bad guys don’t stand a chance.”

  She smiled weakly. “Maybe.”

  “Seriously though, the mindchip era is nearly over? You’re screwing with me, right?”

  Monica flipped a switch on the dashboard to kick in the sound-dampening technology so she could more easily talk over the wind. “Here comes the lecture,” he thought.

  “The mindchip gives you wireless access to the internet,” she said, “but that alone doesn’t mean much. Let’s say you want to find out where all the labs in the world are that are working on genetic splicing with CRISPR to make people smarter. You need the chip to write a self-evolving algorithm for that that gets smarter as it goes along to weed out their hideouts, which can hack past their firewalls better, figure out how to hop through barriers, like computers inside faraday cages not even attached to the internet. These specialty AIs are nearly supersentient in how smart they can be in achieving your aims for you. The latest mindchips are optical, function at the speed of light. So they can evolve their own algorithms at blinding speed. But no matter how many missions you send your ever-more-clever-AI-minions on, they have to report back to you. You then have to decide what to do with this information. Only, this part of the brain isn’t upgraded. It’s working at 100m/sec clock speed, about a cagillion times slower than the lightspeed the mindchip works at.

  “Let’s say you find the rogue scientist you’re looking for, selling his IQ-boosting breakthrough to North Korea so it can put the rest of the world under its psychotic totalitarian rule. No one smart enough to stop them. Oh, and by the way, he knows you’re on to him. So he sends a trained killer after you. What are you going to do? I tell you what you’re going to do, you’re going to hand over the problem solving to the chip; it’s the only sure way to get a leg up. So the chip writes the self-evolving software moles that will trace your conspirator’s path so you can intercept him before he can broker the sale. And you use the chip to find the assassins coming after you and shut them down too. You won’t trust your own mind to do it. Works too slow, lucky to find one way to stop one trained assassin in the time it takes the chip to find a hundred ways to stop him, all far more likely to work because it can work the internet of things like a maestro. It’ll find out where the assassin takes his coffee every morning. It’ll hack the coffee machine in the Starbucks to poison his cup. It’ll hack his cell phone to make sure the 911 call doesn’t go through, and if it does, it’ll hack the ambulance to make sure its GPS gets the driver lost en route to him, or causes the ambulance to crash. Your mindchip’s got a million and one ways to disable your assassin before he even gets out of bed in the morning that take no time to initiate. With your unupgraded mind, by contrast, you’ve got one idea maybe, and it’ll take you a week to get everything in place, and by then you’ll be dead.”

  He massaged his jaw out of the locked position it had frozen into, the one depicting a mask of horror. “Please tell me you’re joking about what those mindchips can actually do.”

  She shrugged. “The off-the-shelf ones, forgettabout it. By I might have made some tweaks to my own.”

  The look of shock was wearing no better on his face, forcing him to massage his forehead to forestall the tension headache she was giving him. “So what you’re saying is live with a mindchip long enough and you lose your mind entirely? You get to where you can’t make a decision to take a poop on your own.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “Maybe I should wait for the nanococktail.”

  “You’re hopeless, you know that?”

  “Incidentally, how long did it take you to get your mindchip do all that?”

  “I reprogrammed it on the way over here. Why?”

  “Just glad to have you as a partner, that’s all.” Ethan ignored the secondary gain of every glancing look at her for now; it was beside the point he was trying to make. It didn’t help that the wind blowing in their faces was driving the scents coming off her like taking a hit on a bong. And that collectively they reminded him of hiking in the rain forest. It had been a while since he’d done that and it drove him mad how she could fill him with the same sense of adventure without really trying.

  “Please, Ethan. Soon enough most everyone will be able to do what I just described. So my little tweaks are not such an advantage as all that. That’s why…” She decided it wasn’t worth shoving his nose in it. He was too fragile right now. Most days, actually. Maybe she should just burst his bubble once and for all. The last thought was his, but the others he could read on her face better than a Wall Street wizard read a ticker tape.

  “That’s why…?” he said, leadingly.

  “I just had the injection this morning. A complete suite.”

  “The complete suite? I’m frightened to ask.”

  “A nano mix to boost muscle, bone, and tendon strength, another to boost reflexes, another self-healing package in case I get shot.”

  “No way. So w
hat, you’re like Wonder Woman now?”

  “Basically. Not sure how long it takes for all that to kick in but…”

  “But it stays out of your head, right?”

  “The higher brain centers, anyway. Has to be dialed into the medulla to do their thing. But if the system is hacked I still have the mindchip to counterhack for me. Best we can do for now until the neuro-cocktails get more impervious to hacking. Not sure I want to be an early adopter there. Besides, not sure seeing dragons flying around the city is what people like us are about. About the only benefit to neuro-enhancement with nano. Cops are pretty hard core realists as far as it goes.”

  “Shiiiit. And I felt like a primitive before I got into the car. Nice way to build me up, Monica.”

  “I was going to tell you all the things you could do with your new mindchip! How was I supposed to know you’d hold off even after finding out…”

  “Finding out what, that I had cancer?”

  “Without the mindchip to run self-diagnostics on how the medical nano is doing, it can’t evolve the nano in your body fast enough to stay ahead of the cancer.”

  “I can always find some guy working with a CRISPR unit in his garage to edit the cancer and the genes giving rise to it out of me. Maybe he can cure me of aging while he’s at it. Thus preserving my Neanderthal status for all eternity.”

  She shook her head slowly and sighed. “Ever stop to think maybe I’m not the partner for you? The more I jump into the future, the more you hold back. Maybe if you didn’t have to face a concrete expression of your worst fears in me each day, you’d get over them that much sooner.”

  He grunted. “No one in my germline gets over anything quickly; we’re rather proud of that. We never got over Hitler and we never stopped hunting the Nazis for war crimes. Takes all kinds.”

  “I thought you Jews embraced education.”

  “I’m going to let that anti-Semitic remark slide, as a way of doing penance for talking down to the fridge. Which even I can recognize is a defense mechanism, by the way. Maybe you should come to terms with your own defense mechanisms.”

  Her expression turned dark as if maybe he’d struck a nerve. Feeling guilty, he said, “Don’t worry, babe. Our basic humanity will see us through the worst of our transhumanity, providing we keep focusing on the best in one another and not the worst.”

  “I guess we’ll have to table this little refrain in the song we love singing together for later. We’re here.” The car pulled to a stop before she could finish getting the words out of her mouth.

  Ethan looked out the window. “So some guy jumps out a window and goes kersplat on the sidewalk. What’s the big deal?”

  “It took a confluence of seven different cutting-edge technologies to get him to make the jump. It’s the kind of murder that the Convergence Era Crimes Unit was expressly designed to solve. Seven technologies coming together and counting, Ethan. My mindchip isn’t convinced it has isolated them all.”

  “Fuck me.”

  FOUR

  “You want to walk me through the crime scene?” Ethan said, looking down at Pancake Man on the sidewalk from his upstairs balcony, thirteen stories up.

  “Sliding glass doors to the balcony are smart-glass,” Monica explained, joining him for the lovely view. “They adjust themselves so if you don’t see the door is closed and walk through it, it crumbles like Hollywood sugar-water doors, harmlessly, so as not to cut your head off.” She turned to take in what was left of the smart-glass panes inside the sliding glass doors. “If, on the other hand, you’re pondering committing suicide by jumping off the balcony, they refuse to open at all, and to break even if you take a sledge hammer to them.”

  Ethan regarded the not-so-friendly-looking glass shards at his feet. “No way the smart-glass reads your mind.”

  “No, actually the apartment AI does that.” She walked them back inside the flat, pointed to the ceiling and what looked like one of those department store colored domes disguising a surveillance camera inside. Only, inside this dome was a brain far more powerful than his. Ethan was proud of the fact that his own apartment AI had the decency to be less conspicuously displayed; of course, it was a far more primitive model.

  “The place is like one big amplification center for EMF waves coming off your head,” she continued, “which the house computer then translates.” Monica tapped the walls with her bare knuckles to emphasize the metal sheeting only disguised to look like plaster. “If you’re suicidal, it dials 911 silently, dialogues with them without you even knowing, while it tries to talk you down at this end. The 911 operator can overhear the conversation, and take over if she thinks she can do better. In the meantime, cops are already rolling to your door.”

  Ethan noticed the blood on the glass shards. It seemed to be spreading as the angle of the sun changed in the daytime sky. Evidently neither the house computer nor the glass doors cared about protecting their tenant. “So you’re saying whoever did this hacked the house computer and the smart glass?”

  “That’s right.”

  “The house computer,” he said, his eyes returning to the creepy domed glass over his head, “it can even talk back to you without you knowing, plant subliminals in your mind, using this same EMF translation software?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact,” Monica said, tucking her hair behind her ears. It kept raining down on her every time she glanced down at the floor to check for evidence. “It was set to promote positive mental hygiene, not undermine it.”

  “Did it undermine it, our tenant’s mental hygiene, I mean?”

  Their eyes met. “Yes.”

  “So we have three hacks so far. One involved understanding the nanite technology in the glass well enough to screw with it. Another required understanding how to tweak EMF waves enough to fuck with his head. And another involved the ability to hack the apartment’s AI.”

  Monica sighed. “You’re still not seeing the big picture. The apartment AI is overseen by the building AI, which is overseen by the district AI which, is overseen by the City AI.”

  “Like stacked Russian dolls.” Ethan had moved on to checking out the interior. He set down the Matryoshka dolls that had inspired the connection.

  “Yes. The apartment AIs also talk to one another, share best practices. One learns something the hard way about how to better care for its tenant, it shares that learning so the others don’t have to learn as much for themselves.”

  “So, an ecosystem AI was in play in addition to the multi-level protection that comes from storing a safe within a safe within a safe within a… you get the idea,” Ethan said.

  “That’s right.” Monica had her hands on her hips and was turning about on herself repeatedly, her eyes going everywhere, trying to figure out if there was possibly anything else the apartment could tell her that she hadn’t already detected.

  “So, five different fields of expertise.” Ethan clicked the pen in his hand five times absently for emphasis. “And two more you’ve identified that I haven’t yet.” He clicked the pen two more times. “There was a time when one hacker might have been able to do it all. But ecosystems AI is so sophisticated these days. Same with the Russian Doll AI algorithms. Each level more unhackable than the other because it has more AI to throw at you to shut you down. So if it’s not one guy then… then what?”

  Ethan walked the apartment getting a look at it from different angles, fingering the collectibles, hoping to shake an idea loose. The sunny yellow walls, the electric orange carpet… It was like a Florida cabana fixed up to please a punk rocker. “He hacked his own mind? With a mindchip?”

  “Mindchips are prohibited from writing certain self-evolving algorithms, the ones available to consumers, anyway.”

  “So he hacked his own mindchip—despite the anti-hacking protocols. Without any of the Russian Dolls nested defenses shutting him down. And now we’re at six aptitudes and six fields of expertise and counting.”

  “Or whoever did this to him is military, DOD, DARPA, NS
A, any number of black ops agencies. They’re the only ones with the tools and clearance to hack mindchips. But that just gets you back to five aptitudes and counting.”

  “There’s always Anonymous. Our boy could be a free spirit like me.” Ethan held up the flier in his hand for an upcoming rock concert, picked up off the kitchen counter, that had put the “free spirit” idea in his head. The CSI inspection bots swarming over the apartment, didn’t appreciate him tampering with the scene, and the one on the kitchen counter, the size of a baseball cap, yanked the flier out of his hand. Ethan didn’t much mind; he was busy trying to visualize the Anonymous hacker infiltrating his own mindchip to mess with it.

  “Careful who you’re calling free. That was a dig against you, not Anonymous, in case you were wondering.”

  “Even if someone else did this to Pancake Man, and he is military, he’s working off-book in all likelihood. Otherwise there would have been no trace of Pancake Man. Not with the kind of resources the military has. He’d just have disappeared, ceased to even have ever existed by any evidence of any computer trails he might have left behind. So our killer, at the very least, had to hack his way around military security to go after this guy without the military finding out. So we’re at seven aptitudes and seven fields of expertise, if you believe the guy is military.”

  Monica looked at him, surprised. “I do believe he’s military.”

  “Why?”

  “If the murder was done that cleanly, say, the body disappeared and all evidence of his existence wiped clean from the internet, someone would have started knocking on doors, the wrong kinds of doors. The kinds you don’t want knocked on if you’re in the military or an alphabet soup agency.”

  “Now you’re saying the killer is the military if they could have made Pancake Man disappear without a trace but didn’t. Which is it? You can’t have it both ways.”

  She sighed. “I guess you’re right.”