“Not till you explain what’s with the coffee.”
“Oral fix. Was probably traumatized as an infant. And the reason I don’t get a mindchip is I really don’t want to know for sure.”
She smiled ruefully. “I’m going to knock heads with my father, break down every door he puts between me and him at the pentagon.”
“So you’ll be dead by lunch then? Maybe we should have our last meal together at Starbucks, an actual sit-down breakfast.”
“I’ll forgive all the disrespect of my self-evolving algorithms that comment implies because, as it turns out, I’m in the mood for a chocolate croissant.”
The Ferrari was already changing course towards the Starbucks, according to the GPS on the dash without further prompting. He was really going to have to learn to become less intoxicated by her sheer presence. Considering he couldn’t even remember the car starting and driving off from the curb in front of his apartment building.
***
Monica and Ethan grabbed a small table for two by the window. It was just small enough that their noses were practically touching. She could see him hiding his wicked smile beneath the rim of his cup, thinking he was being all sly. She smiled despite herself. “This was your real agenda, to stare into my eyes, breathe the same air I breathe, intimacy by proximity? Desperate, real desperate.”
“You have no idea.”
She took a couple deep breaths and felt herself warming to him. Then it occurred to her. “You bastard. So that’s why they call that the Amoroso coffee. The mist is sending nano into my lungs that is some kind of aphrodisiac.”
“Weak form of the drug Ecstasy. Even if you’re not that into me, you’ll be screwing the spindle this tabletop is balancing on in another five minutes.”
She laughed so hard she spit coffee through her nose. She wiped her face. “If that wasn’t gross enough to spoil the moment, let’s hope it got the last of the nanites out of my system. Really, Ethan, you need to get out more,” she said rising from her chair. “It’s been so long since you’ve been with a woman you’re convinced you have to date-rape them.” She grabbed his coffee and tossed it into the garbage on her way out the door.
Trailing behind her, he said, “You make it sound so predatory. I was just taking some Draino to that clogged sink you call a heart.”
She dropped him at Pancake Man’s apartment. Needless to say the drive over had been rather quiet. She hadn’t said a word. Getting out of the car, all he could think of was he really would have loved to have been on that ride with her to Washington DC. Riding that Ferrari faster than a NASCAR while using her mindchip’s self-evolving hacking algorithms to get around the police, the stop lights, traffic cams. Putting his own fear of mindchips aside, having an upgraded girlfriend with one was really cool. Even if she hadn’t exactly taken to the term “girlfriend” yet, or worse, grasped that it meant sleeping with him.
Tossing him her cell phone, she said, “Has my avatar on it. You can even project a full holo of my likeness, just don’t get any sick ideas. Enjoy. Techa knows that avatar is as close as you’ll get to me in a while.” She mumbled the last part as she sped off.
NINE
“Hello, I’m not here right now, but if you’d like to talk to my avatar, feel free,” Pancake Man said, greeting Ethan at the door to his apartment. Startled, Ethan took a step back, feeling rude now for having forced his way into the apartment. “I’ll be happy to talk to you, thank you,” Ethan said to the hologram. The only difference between Pancake Man and his avatar was that Ethan could see through the avatar and he was decidedly less two-dimensional. Oh, and—here’s one for the irony books—his face really was pancake shaped, even in life. That is to say, it was very round, somewhat flattened, the bulbous cheek bones and protruding supraorbital bones notwithstanding, like the rising ridges of a pie hot out of the oven.
Ethan stepped into the apartment, trying to take it in better without the pressure of having to come up with quick answers as to who committed the murder. If anything, he was under more pressure than ever to solve the case as a day had lapsed, but it didn’t feel that way. Nothing like having to prove you were smarter than everyone else with cops, CSI, news cameras, and the rest of the circus around all expecting you to perform at your best.
On closer examination, Gene, a.k.a. Pancake Man, went in for Nootropic orchids. You took a whiff and it amounted to taking a smart-drug cocktail straight into the lungs. Aerosols definitely had certain advantages over pills. He might just take a couple of these home, he thought, after sniffing one. He confirmed the orchids would never die or go out of bloom by the corporate logo just where the stem came out of the soil, like the signature of an artist in the corner of a painting. He probably should have realized the first time he was in the apartment that he had been able to identify seven sub-strains of technology that had been hacked to get to Gene as quickly as he did on account of the nootropic scents circulating in the air. It was rather kind of Monica not to rub it in his face, pardon the expression, as he was sure she hadn’t missed this little point either. Had someone hacked one of the orchids, gotten it to secrete a truth serum instead that Gene inhaled which caused him to unlock Pandora’s Box for his attackers?
Ethan flipped open the cell phone that Monica had left him. “Any of these nootropic flowers been hacked?” He aimed the phone about the apartment, putting it up to each flower.
“Gas disperses evenly in a closed space, genius. I really don’t need you shoving my face in a flower to see if one of them has been hacked.”
Ethan grimaced. “And suddenly it’s oh so clear why all of my appliances are acting up on me. Monica, passive aggressive much?” he said putting his mouth up to the phone in the impotent hope that yelling at her through the phone would actually accomplish something, being as she wasn’t at the other end.
“And yes, all the flowers have been hacked, by the owner, to help procure an enhanced altered state conducive to keeping him in the peak performance zone for his scientific research.”
“Speaking of altered states, am I speaking to the Monica avatar?”
“No, this is the cell phone avatar.”
“Thought you sounded rather devoid of personality.”
“Well, I never!”
“Monica avatar, please.”
“Fine, and good riddance!”
“What is it, Ethan?” Monica’s avatar said, capturing her voice perfectly, and sounding just as annoyed as when he’d left her. Maybe she remained synced to the avatar somehow so it reflected her every mood.
“Um, this is Gene’s avatar,” he said holding the phone up to Gene. “Gene avatar, say hello to Monica avatar.”
“Don’t mind him, he’s an idiot,” Monica avatar said.
“And rude too. He agrees to speak to me, enters my home, and then proceeds to ignore me as if I’m not even there. I’m barely standing three feet from him!”
“I thought you didn’t really exist except as a hologram until I talked to you!” Ethan said.
“Is that supposed to be like the Zen joke, if a tree falls over in a forest and only a hologram is there to see it, did it really fall over?”
Ethan shook his head, eyes to floor, saying, “Mercy,” repeatedly.
“My avatar doesn’t like to be kept waiting any more than I do, Ethan,” the Monica avatar said.
“I need you to lobotomize the Gene avatar—no offense, Gene—and hack into the apartment AI so I can replay what Gene was working on before he was killed.”
“About the whole lobotomy thing…” Gene said nervously, gesturing. But before he could get the rest out, the Gene holo was gone and replacing it was a holo of what the real Gene was working on prior to his departure from the world.
“Monica avatar, you’re no joke, you know that? You evolved an algorithm just to do that in less time than it took me to blink.”
“You can come faster, if that makes you feel any worse.”
Ethan made a sour face, mumbling, “They told you not to s
hit where you eat, but did you listen? Oh no.” Ethan put his relationship problems aside to concentrate on the hologram before him. It was a nano swarm of some kind. The hive was massing in the shape of a globe, in a perfect simulation of Earth. “Zoom in,” he said.
The holo zoomed until he could see the little buzzing-fly-like nanites crawling over one another to create the landscape of a savannah, the trees, the grass, the animals, the wind blowing across the land, the atmosphere, the running water. “Holy shit!” He swallowed hard. “Zoom some more please.” The holo zoomed further until he was looking at the microbes teaming in the soil, just so many more differentiated nano, crawling over their siblings.
“What’s this experiment called?”
“The genesis effect,” the Monica hologram said.
“So, if I’m reading this correctly, this nanococktail can create an entire planet from scratch.”
“More accurately it can devour an entire planet and remake it as a supersentient life form with countless sentient lifeforms living upon it under its dominion.”
“Sort of a digital version of the Gaia hypothesis.”
“Yes.”
“And, out of curiosity, how long does it take to do this?”
“A matter of hours. The self-reproducing nanites reproduce at a geometric rate until they hit a critical mass and their reproduction goes post exponential.”
“And the genesis effect could do this to our Earth?”
“Yes. To any planet, moon, asteroid, or solid body, obviously.”
“A good reason to kill him, don’t you think?” Ethan said. “If you’re a Luddite like me, or at least not exactly ready to go that far into the future yet.”
“Any number of transhumanist factions could be behind the killing. Like animal rights advocates who don’t all agree on what the most humane treatment of animals is—some eschewing pets, say—not all transhumanists agree on the best path to the future. So long as each faction merely offers its version of the future to the world as one of many to choose from, they get along just fine. But if one tries to force a certain future on all the others...”
“How do you enter a burgeoning number of futures at once?”
“In virtual reality it’s a non-issue,” the Monica avatar explained. “In meat space, different takes on the future could be confined to different cities or districts within the city, or played out on different worlds.”
“But if this cat got out of the bag,” he said, running his hand through the globe, “then wherever you go in the cosmos, it’d just be one future for all.”
“Yes, applying convergence thinking to the problem, it would be easy to see how one could take one of the space warping engines being worked on at NASA and SPACE-X and NCAM, and use them to disperse the Genesis Effect Nano to planets in our solar system, and beyond. It’s conceivable that the entire galaxy could be terraformed in this manner in a matter of days, providing you could get the 3D printers responsible for printing the spaceships and the nano to proliferate in their own geometric pattern, which is not much of a stretch.”
Ethan gulped. “For the record, if someone hadn’t killed this guy, I would have.”
“The suspect pool admittedly is going to be deep.”
To be honest, Monica’s avatar was sounding nearly as dry as Gene’s. He decided he’d let the subject go as things were sore enough between them as it was. Maybe she’d done that for a reason, because she was still mad at him. Maybe she knew he’d benefit from the echo chamber effect in his head, as if he was just talking to another part of himself. When he took his eyes off the globe and put them on Monica’s holo, she promptly grew self-conscious and dissolved her figure, retreating into the phone like a genie returning to its lamp. “Mystery solved. She’s definitely underscoring her personality and her physicality for my benefit. Figuring the fewer distractions from this investigation the better. Maybe she’s right.” Nah, screw it. Even if she was, he’d have to make his attraction for her drive the investigation forward, not slow it down, or he wasn’t going to end up living any kind of balanced life at all.
Returning his eyes to the nano cloud, he said, “Well, I wanted a case that would put me on the map.”
“I’d say you found it,” the Monica avatar said projecting her voice from the speaker in the cell phone.
TEN
Ethan was at the coroner’s office at the city morgue, looking for the coroner. He gave up searching in short order. One Easter egg hunt a week with his cell phone and one hide-and-seek game with his vacuum cleaner was really his limit.
He headed straightaway to the area of the morgue where the dead bodies were kept, searching for the toe tag belonging to the Pancake Man. It was strange not to be knocked over by the aroma of formaldehyde. He wondered what the hell they used to preserve bodies these days. Maybe enough people were opting for the more politically correct natural burials, and body preservation was just on the way out. That or the latest city regs mandated they handled that kind of thing entirely at the funeral shop. With the absence of chemicals hanging in the air, there was no protecting his nose from the ripe bodies, however. He began sniffing his way through the piquant odors like a connoisseur in a flower shop.
What he found instead of Pancake Man was an outline of a body looking as if it had been carved out of dead red ants. He nodded. “So that’s what you do to hide a breakthrough nanotech invention you want to keep out of the hands of competitors until you’re ready to release it onto the world.” But then, letting its supersentience take you over would make you one smart cookie indeed and so damn hard to hack. Whoever killed you probably figured he had no other choice. If he waited any longer, and you started gobbling up more mental real estate from planet earth, you might be unstoppable.
“Did I hear you mumble some explanation as to what happened to my corpse,” the coroner said walking in on him, and tying her black hair back, preparing to dig into the pancake man. Any color to her complexion at all looked to be provided by the overhead lights, casting a lime-green hue. She was tall, like Monica; apparently there were to be no diminutive-sized women in Ethan’s life that might lend the slightest chance of him getting the upper hand, if only psychologically. Ethan noticed there was no aura of dead bodies about her. She smelled like a day at the beach. Aerosolized nano must have been cocooning her in a protective womb of air filtration. Sweet! No pun intended. He’d never read about that application of nano before, but that didn’t mean much, not with all the cocktails people were spitting out daily.
“First body I’ve had to take a shovel to in a while.” She took a scoop out of the dead nanites and spread them out on her examination board, going at them with adjustable lights and enlarging lenses, until finally she had one under a high magnification microscope. “Looks to me like he got a bad case of black market nano, probably meant to pump up his muscles like some steroid freak, but decided to mass produce at his expense instead.” She looked up from her microscope straight at him. “Unless you got a better explanation?”
“No, not really. If you don’t mind being the smart one in the relationship, I gotta girlfriend who can’t stand me, so the position is wide open. You’re pretty, you’re gainfully employed—in an Age of Abundance no less—making you a masochist like me. I’m sure we’ll get along fine, really.”
She smiled wearily. “I’m strictly robo-sex since 2020 or so. Humans are way too much trouble for a professional like myself. You should try it. Personally, I thought people were overrated even before transhumans walked among us.”
“And just what flavor of transhuman are you, you don’t mind me asking?”
“The kind that thinks humans should be put in zoos before they go extinct.”
Ethan nodded while stretching his lips as if both ends were playing tug of war with each other. “You sure you aren’t any relation to my girlfriend?”
“Sorry. Suppose that is an all-too-common sentiment these days. I really do value their right to life; they’re sort of today’s Amish. Anything
I can help you with, detective? I do so not-treasure our meetings, and I’ve got a lot of pressing cases.”
“Honestly, if I ran into a woman who didn’t give me grief, I wouldn’t know who I was. Just one more thing before you go. Speaking hypothetically, if you wanted to dissolve the world in a super-sentient nano cloud, how would you go about it?”
“Hmm.” She started pondering the point as if the possibility the question might be a joke was entirely out of the question. Transhumanists. Not much of a sense of humor. They took everything seriously. “That’s a tall order by 2025 standards. You’d need to download supersentience into the nano cloud itself, make that supersentience self-evolving so it could make the most of its proliferating, self-reproducing nano. So the bigger its brain got the easier it was to fulfill its mission. It would have to be expert at generating self-evolving algorithms that could reproduce the countless lifeforms in the natural world in the artificial world.” She pulled at her neck as she thought aloud.
“Chances are it wouldn’t find everything it needed in the natural world to be all that it can be,” she continued. “So in the end, it has to figure out how to work with zero point energy, that is to say, pull what it needs out of the void, or vacuum of space, by converting energy to matter, energy that is highly unstable, there one second and gone the next, to begin with. Not too many supersentience types conversant in zero point energy. Not everyone even believes in it. But you need to add an artificial life guy to the mix of nano designers. The kind that has been hanging out at Los Alamos labs since the 1990s working on populating virtual worlds with artificial life. They might have the knowhow it takes to mate supersentience with artificial life demands which can then be married to the nanotech.”
Ethan swore the skin on her neck was getting more elastic the more she pulled at it absently.
“That’s the minimalist approach,” she said, “just weaving together those three threads to fabricate your improbable future. But a mind that large would likely go insane if it remained conscious. It could decide to evolve itself into a black hole and start devouring spacetime, if only to create company for itself in the form of other supersentiences. I would definitely want to bring in some spiritualists, some psychologists and sociologists, and philosophers to figure out how to keep the thing from becoming unhinged. Interesting convergence tech project though. Initially, it seems like you can do it without employing a convergence approach. But you realize that’s not the case at all, the longer you ponder the problem.”
Convergence_ The Time Weavers Page 6