Noah turned into a wax statue, his eyes wider than normal, as he considered the implications. “You’ve figured out how to hack all the UPS and consumer droids?”
“Yep.”
His son nodded his head. “Cool. Major hack, considering all the effort put in to preventing bozos like you from screwing with them. But I still don’t see the point. I thought you were all about serving the greater good, thwarting the one percent at the top keeping the ninety-nine percent in their place as wage slaves forever, ya-da, ya-da, ya-da.” Noah continued to talk at him while keeping his eyes on his robot, and his fingers flying over his virtual keyboard hovering between him and the robot, so he could upgrade the LEGO-bot’s coding on the fly.
“Enough people have to be out of work to pressure the bastards to implement Universal Basic Income as a human right. I thought forty percent unemployment would do the trick, but they really don’t care how many people suffer. And if you’ve still got a job, it’s really not your problem, so there’s no sense of urgency among the majority.”
“So, go after the inventors automating everything and putting everyone out of work, leave the poor bastard making minimum wage mowing lawns alone. He’s got enough problems.”
“If my retrovirus works on the grass, I’ll be able to tweak the cocktail to infect a wider swath of vegetation. Every fruit and vegetable on the market. And then I can alter the nature of what the virus does.”
Noah’s head craned up from his robot and his brow furrowed. “I’m frightened to ask.”
***
Noah perked up, stretching out of his slouched-back pose. The bit about altering the virus was the first thing his father had said that was new. The rest of the conversation was being replayed verbatim from when they first had it, when Noah was nine years of age. The truth was they’d had Universal Basic Income for over seven years now, and not on account of anything his father did. Rather than just get bent out of shape that his father—who was old enough to be his grandfather—was time-slipping, precisely because he wouldn’t consider any of the human upgrades, he just took a swim in the past along with him.
“Once I’ve got the smart gene into the wider populace,” Jarod continued, “everyone will have a 1000-plus IQ. Let’s see them try to keep people down then.”
Noah let out a whistle. “Sweet. Talk about a quiet revolution. But there’re untold genes associated with intelligence. No way you mastered them all by yourself.”
“What do you think your CRISPR homework has been about?”
“Getting mice to dance Swan Lake?” he communicated with grand gestures. “As you can tell, I don’t bother to ask anymore. It’s entertain your madness or go homeless. I see what they do to those guys. Genius whack job father beats Big Brother beat downs any day.” He had no desire to be carted off to a warehouse run kibbutz-style where his nanny would be a low-cost off-the-shelf droid. It was that or accept a mindchip or perhaps one of the still primitive nanococktails, or both, if he wanted a place of his own. No one would believe he and his father could match transhumanist feats without the upgrades.
“Scientists all over the world are using CRISPR to close in on the confluence of genes that can boost intelligence. All you need to do is get a spy camera on them, collate their work, synthesize it with the missing pieces I’ve had you working on…”
Noah nodded with the dawning awareness. “The mosquito droids you had me cobble together… they were for your little army of spies… So you actually have all the missing pieces in place?”
“All except for this last piece in my hands here I’m working on now. If it works on the grass, we’re home free.” Jarod fought with his shaking hands, his eyes tearing up in frustration, which didn’t help the detail work. Noah was still too worked up to come to his aid.
Noah nodded slowly as he paced, ran his hands through his hair, and said, “You brought together hacker skills for accessing the droid quad-copters, with gene-altering knowhow for the grass, and micro-engineering for the mosquito-sized spies. Nice bit of convergence tech wizardry, Dad! What else am I missing?” He paused with his pacing, pulled at his hair, then resumed taking laps. “You had to use AI to ferret out the labs in question on the net.”
“That’s one of the algorithms I had you working on for me.”
“You mean I did most of the work? You dick!”
“How do you think the one percent stays on top? Control information, and you can even make people smarter than you do your bidding. Especially if it’s the only way they can make enough money to free up their minds.”
Noah nodded slowly as he continued to think things through. He picked up a tennis ball and bounced it off the head of his LEGO robot, who kept just catching his balance rather than accept the consequences of falling over and impacting the cement floor. Each time the ball connected with the robot’s head, Noah seemed to make another connection in his mind. “Hence your urgency to get the monthly payout of everyone on UBI up to five thousand a month or more.” He caught the ball bouncing off the robot’s head, tossed it for another round. “If they have more than their basic needs met, and have actual disposable income, then they can work on their own projects.”
He dropped the ball and scratched his chin, seeing what else he could make of this wild notion. “Even if your fix only takes with a small percentage of the population, the most genetically susceptible, or the early adopters, say, who don’t mind throwing the switch on their new souped up minds… that many empowered minds, and the ten percent tax off the sale of their creations that feed back into UBI… Yeah, you’ll get the disposable income of the least of us up to where it can do some real damage.”
His mind went to the small percentage of 500 IQ people out there already. They were mostly overheating their mindchips to get that kind of performance and frying their brains was pretty much inevitable. But the desperation to transcend the human condition and improve the plight of the ninety-nine percent was just that great. If what his father was proposing actually worked, they could all be rocking 1000 IQs soon enough and with zero of the mental-health risks.
“I’m sorry I had to manipulate you into seeing the light, son. But you’re terribly hardened against any form of enlightenment, even with all your IQ to spare.”
“Ha-ha. All right, you win,” he said, dismissing the hologram and dropping the controls to his LEGO robot, giving up on his moonwalk project. He sidled up next to his father at his workbench. “Note to self: Get the old man in the shower. He smells.” Every time he sat alongside his father, he looked bigger and his dad looked smaller. The premature growth spurt had put him at 6’2”, and climbing, already an inch taller than the old man. The shaggy mop of hair on his head didn’t help. Now, if he could get some silver to streak his black mane, like the old man, that wouldn’t be so bad.
Noah grabbed the quadcopter out of his father’s hands and took over the tinkering from him. “You do realize your impatience to put an end to UBI subsistence living could end us all? Road to hell is paved with good intentions and all.”
“How do you mean?”
“Duh. They’ve been debating just this point on the internet since someone invented the first CRISPR unit. What’s more destabilizing, one super-sentient AGI keeping an eye on us, evolving so fast we can’t possibly keep up, or boosting everyone’s intelligence so they can keep up? And in so doing, empowering anyone on earth to destroy the world. Think what a Tesla or an Einstein working in a basement alone with a jihadist mindset could do. Tesla’s IQ was probably 190, tops. Now boost that to a 1000. It’s like six of one, half a dozen of the other. Pick your favorite end of world scenario, but no way we survive either.”
“After all my brainwashing, you still don’t get it.” His father sighed with despair.
Noah laughed. “If I have hardening of the cerebral arteries, trust me, it’s a defensive mechanism.”
“With that kind of mind power so democratically distributed, we can all reinvent the world and still have enough genius left over to
keep an eye on one another. It’s The Transparent Society Brin wrote about, only, not from the top down, in a NSA-keeps-an-eye-on-all-of-us kind of way. It’s unilateral, everybody keeping an eye on everyone to keep us safe.” Impatient with Noah’s progress, Jarod tried to reclaim the quadcopter, but Noah pushed his shaky hands away.
“You have to use Convergence-Tech psychology to see the world of today as it really is, son. We don’t just boost IQs to 1000. We upgrade the nanotech in everyone’s heads so we have telepathic connections to one another, so we can know what each other is thinking. The same way chipheads can communicate with one another wirelessly, nano-enhanced minds will be able to send and receive inordinate amounts of data between them. Maybe with a 1000 IQ and the souped up minds nanococktails will provide, we’ll be able to connect with hundreds of minds before we start to feel overloaded. So the cell of the God body isn’t one person anymore, it’s a hundred, until the day it’s a thousand with the next generation of breakthroughs.”
His father was big on terms like “the God body,” insisting they were building heaven on earth and creating gods, not because it was biblical prophecy, but because there really wasn’t a God. Therefore, it was a moral obligation to give every last human godlike powers just so he wouldn’t be tempted to put his sense of empowerment outside of himself in some fictional figure. Whatever.
“That’s a lot of different technological threads coming together, Dad, in a convergence we haven’t even touched on. You need more than boosted IQ for that. You need the nanococktails, like you say, to migrate to the synapses of the human brain where it can not only moderate our sense of reality, but connect our minds with one another. You need accelerated neuronal speeds so that we can process that much more information in less time without feeling overwhelmed being in touch with so many minds. Really, you need an android body. Not sure even an upgraded human body can accomplish what you’re talking about.”
His father shrugged. “Maybe long-term that can be a goal. But we can bridge the gap in the meantime by weaving together other technological threads. For instance, a mindchip can run any number of AIs, like the one I used to ferret out the labs I needed and to keep an eye on the internet, could keep an eye out on questionable people for us thinking of blowing up the world. Can even hack their minds with self-evolving hacking software we put on the mindchip in the form of another specialist AI. They’re not general AIs, so no fear of them taking over our own minds or changing up the agenda on us. So even in the absence of higher processing speeds, our minds will know what information is key to act on now.” Once again Jarod tried to get his impatient, tremulous hands back on his toy and once again Noah brushed them away.
Noah nodded, thinking aloud. “Sort of how the unconscious mind, believed to be quantum based and connected to everything in the multiverse, bubbles up to our conscious mind, the relative retard, what it needs to know to act on in the here and now. Assuming the quantum mind really is at work in the unconscious realm as many physicists believe. Could be just another bogus theory without any teeth.”
“You haven’t asked me the seminal question.”
“Afraid to ask.” Noah sighed. “Fine, who have you networked with to create this convergence you need for the synapse-filling nanococktail and the nextgen mindchip—as opposed to the mindchips and nanococktails people are currently using—to go with your 1000 IQ super geeks? Three breakthrough technologies, mind you, not one, each feeding off and informing one another. Please give me a second to finish this in case I go into cardiac arrest upon hearing the answer.” Noah finished tweaking the droid copter, let it out of his hands to fly up into the center of the room and mist away. “That spread what you looking for?”
“Perfect,” his father said.
Noah sighed. “Okay, fine. Hit me with your best shot.”
“That mind-cap I’ve had you sleeping with for the last year...”
“Yeah, magnet therapy. Honestly, Dad, if you want me to take you seriously, it would help if you didn’t go off the deep end with every bit of fly-by-night technology you stumble upon.”
“Well, I lied.”
His son gazed at him, wide-eyed. “Techa preserve me.” Since there was no God, at least according to his father, “God help me” was not permitted around the house. Since technology was the best stand-in for God, he was allowed to say things like “Techa preserve me.”
“It allows you to do work for me from dream state. Basically it accesses your quantum mind, assigns it problems to figure out, then compiles the results. The AI sorts solutions for the ones that are most actionable based on the state of the art. Filters those through your dreams, which it enhances to see which alternate futures you can accommodate to and which ones you can’t.”
“And…” Noah said, his mouth hanging open. He knew better than to go off on him before he heard the punch line. And he knew enough to know this wasn’t the punchline.
“I had the 3D printers print you up a girlfriend to handle weaving all three technological threads together into the necessary convergence.”
With Noah’s mind now sufficiently off the controls, the quadcopter went crashing into the basement wall, and then to the floor. “Now, I know you’re messing with me, because 3D printers aren’t nearly that advanced yet. They’ve just recently perfected how to do vascularization of tissue. They can do entire organs. But entire people? Get outta here.”
“Try and keep up, son. That was the problem I put the mind-cap to solve. She’s almost done incubating.”
Noah felt his throat go dry. He gulped instinctively anyway, even though he knew the gesture was pointless.
His father’s workaround implied that even if he couldn’t get Noah’s mind to dialogue better with his quantum self, he was able to design a 3D printer that could.
“Well, of course, to drive the convergence of technologies we needed in the here and now, we required a shortcut,” Jarod said. “Even with all the CRISPR-enabled geneticists out there, which includes former truck drivers and cocktail waitresses rebounding from unemployment with their DIY CRISPR machines…”
“You couldn’t wait, could you? As if technology isn’t moving fast enough already. You just had to make it go faster. Well, curiosity may have killed the cat, but impatience will bring all of creation down on our heads.”
“You say that now, but wait till you get a load of your new girlfriend.”
“You’re such a manipulative bastard. I can’t believe you’re using my hormonal surges against me so I’m so love struck I can’t see straight.”
His father shrugged. “Whatever works. Kids are so hard to motivate these days.”
“You’re okay with your fourteen-year-old son getting it on with a fourteen-year-old synth girl who has actually only been alive for a year?”
“Technically, she’s been in a medically induced coma for most of that time, so she could tackle all of the challenges I set before her, but yeah.”
“Before this gets any weirder, she looks fourteen, right?”
His father shrugged. “The breasts might look sixteen. Consider it a fixed marriage so you don’t go off and damage the gene pool. But you kids want to keep it to heavy petting for now until you’re some magical, state-sanctioned age to get it on, who am I to say?”
Noah shook his head slowly in disbelief. “Wow. Just think, the girl of my dreams, literally, has been sent here to liberate mankind forever from all who would oppress them. To essentially turn each and every person into a convergence tech wizard far too empowered to ever be held in check. How cool is that? Assuming she’s up to the task.”
“She will be every bit as fortified as the triune god of the Christians, with the three key breakthroughs she represents in genetic, mindchip, and nano enhancement, and the unique synergy those three acting together create.”
“That’s sacrilege, but whatever. I get your point.” His knee was bouncing up and down so fast it was shaking the work table. “She’s like really hot, right?”
“I c
an show you her picture. You want to go change pants first to hide that boner you’re about to get?”
Noah smiled, hesitated, then ran upstairs to change into his sweats. He sent his voice trailing down the steps after him. “You’re such a manipulative bastard!”
EIGHT
Ethan was standing at the curb in front of his flat when Monica pulled up in an Uber self-driving red Ferrari sports convertible. He got in and did his customary whistle and rubbernecking that he did getting into any of her cars. “Seriously? Is there any form of transportation Uber isn’t into?”
“No, not really. I hear you can rent self-piloting space launches into orbit, and self-piloted nuclear subs to track migrating whale pods year-round.”
“Now I know you’re joking. At least with the last one.”
“No, it’s some kind of educational and promotional thing they worked out with the navy. You need a few busloads of kids to score one, but the hope is at least a few of them will become military brats.”
He just shook his head with a smile on his face and sipped his smart coffee, genetically engineered to do a lot more for him than the traditional farm grown kind.
She spied him savoring his coffee. “You don’t sleep anymore, right, or tire for that matter? I saw the pills on your kitchen counter.”
“Thought it would help me catch bad guys. Instead I lay in bed all night staring at the ceiling mandala until I realized you were just toying with me. Those seven convergence technologies I identified related to Pancake Man’s death were just one of the threads feeding into the seven you identified.”
She smiled. “Just like raising kids. Gotta learn how to build them up. Didn’t want you feeling like a complete imbecile. If it makes you feel any better, from a hair-splitting point of view, you weren’t wrong. Just that I had six other principal technology threads I was following of greater importance.”
“Fine. I’ll take myself back to the crime scene, and then to the morgue to see what I missed. Either I’ll catch up with you, or Techa forbid, see something you didn’t. And you?”
Convergence_ The Time Weavers Page 5