It was time to get back to his daily projects. He didn’t just want to soak in the hot springs, he wanted to see if the microbial life he’d engineered for the various pools of water using one of his CRISPR machines was far enough along to support higher forms of life. Like the creepy critters that existed around thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, Simon had every intention to create a food chain underground that was every bit as elaborate as what was above ground, maybe more so. Step one, of course, had been genetically modifying his family to not feel the cold beneath the surface and to subsist just fine on the microbes in their gut which he genetically modified so they could live off of the minerals and ice so rampant down here, while procuring for their human hosts everything the humans needed to survive. But gut microbes and Zen-like cathedrals of ice, while plenty conducive to a monastic and Spartan spiritual life, do not make for a whole lot of fun. And his kids weren’t having any of his world-making if it didn’t spell more fun each day instead of less. Luckily, his daughter was feeling the call of marine biology and alien-habitat ecology—she’d taken after her father—and was far easier to keep occupied than his son, who had taken after his mother, and preferred tech toys that did things and captivated his imagination in a whole other way.
Simon pondered just what pastime he and his wife could procure together that their entire family would enjoy sharing, as he stripped and sank into one of the underground thermal pools with a big sigh.
Seconds later the ground shook so hard it sent a wave of water over his head. Hard enough to trigger cave-ins throughout the complex from the sounds of it. The shaking continued. He spit out the water he’d swallowed, coughing. And the dawning followed. This wasn’t an earthquake. And those weren’t aftershocks. The dynamics were all wrong. This was something else. A scenario he’d run through his head once and dismissed as far too outlandish.
Those were satellite-based laser canons from low Earth orbit strategically targeting the cracks in the Greenland land base. The bastards were deliberately breaking the island country apart just to kill Simon and his family and what they represented. The next generation of Convergence Tech Wizards. No, it’s not possible! He’d warned them what would happen. Simon had ensured against this inevitability by placing microbes throughout the ice block that was Greenland. By creating a strain that filled every inch of ice to the point where you could see them under a weak microscope. In event of the country breaking apart, the group mind of the microbes would melt the ice, raising the sea water levels to an intolerable height, flooding every major city across the planet sited along the coasts. Verge had spent trillions on convergence technologies just to dial back global warming to protect against such an eventuality. Surely they wouldn’t undo their own handiwork just to squash a few bugs in the ointment.
Simon climbed out of the pool and shivered despite his anti-freeze biology. He wasn’t shuddering from the cold; he was shuddering from just what Verge was capable of to ensure a lock on the future.
***
Johnson and Axelman surveyed the former continent, since downgraded to the largest non-continental island under the sun, breaking apart below them from the relatively safe perch of the helicopter. “Greenland sinking into the sea has been one of the nightmare scenarios on the drawing board for some time. I don’t know why they didn’t think we’d have adequate countermeasures in place for this.”
“Hubris. Pure hubris,” Johnson said, laughing malevolently.
When he sobered, he said, “Have you figured out what to do about the rising sea levels? We’ll lose the coastal cities.”
“Yes.”
Johnson cringed at the whiny tone of Axelman’s voice. The runt-of-the-litter, he should have been crushed at birth and recycled for spare parts. And now, to his shame, Johnson was married to him for life, if he was ever to get and hold the SME’s job of COO. Fortunately for him, Axelman enjoyed the merciless beatings he gave him in private. He said it was for the greater good of the two of them if he offered himself up for Johnson’s venting. Personally, Johnson was convinced Axelman’s secondary gain was of an entirely different nature. There was nothing self-sacrificing in the gesture, nothing at all.
“The marketing campaign goes like this,” Axelman explained. “We take advantage of the clean slates to rebuild. The new skyscrapers will be able to relocate themselves out of harm’s way if a cyclone or tsunami strikes. Or the entire city can throw a dome over itself in time to avert danger if preferred. The rebuilt apartments and offices inside those skyscrapers will even be built to spaceship standards with their own airlocks. They’ll survive if blown into space by a crashing meteor. In short, we’re going to sell this holocaust as the only way to truly futureproof our cities and safeguard them from any possible threat. They’ll thank us in the end, the public, the planet’s leadership, even its snotty-nosed cognoscenti.”
“Best part of all, we’ve proven a SME with its high moral and ethical safeguards in place isn’t nearly as important as a PR department with the likes of us at the helm.” The helicopter had switched to plane mode some time back. But now the propellers had morphed further, giving way to jet engines so they could power themselves to where they could see the flooding cities for themselves against the coast.
“If you can destroy artfully enough, and spin it well enough, you can make any genocide play as the sinking of Sodom and Gomorrah to herald in Heaven on Earth,” Axelman said.
“For such a whiny pisser, Axelman, you have your moments.” Johnson wasn’t content to see the big picture overview out the helo windows of the city being engulfed in sea water. He wanted the close-ups and medium shots of the horror taking place, so he could appreciate the human suffering in gory detail. So he flipped through the numerous live-feed camera angles in his heavily micro-chipped brain of newscasters, citizens with cell phones, of smart-contacts with built-in cameras, traffic cams… the transparent society allowed him more camera angles than even a sadist like Johnson would need to soak it all in. Techa, that humanik really hated humans.
***
Cornwall flicked his newspaper and looked up from his patio chair on the thirty-sixth floor. The exposed balcony afforded an unimpeded view of an encroaching tidal wave rising higher than any of the buildings around him. He glanced down at the street where people were running screaming the opposite direction. Car horns blared before and after taxis collided with uninsured motorists. Some drivers were too busy looking up at the wave to see that they were plowing through pedestrians on the street. Cornwall shook his head with more than his morning allotment of world-weariness. “Myrna!” he shouted to the wife inside the house. “You better call Google. Their damn contact overlays are on the fritz again. You wouldn’t believe what I’m seeing out here.”
“Like they have customer service,” the wife said, trudging out to the patio. Her husband looked like a pasty-skinned lobster out of its shell, for all the shapelessness that implied. Her Indira Gandhi face wasn’t going to hold up much better in this sun, which was why she had the sense to stay inside, something her husband did not. She put her hand up to her eyes as a makeshift visor to help with the glare of the sun. She looked at the tidal wave, and at the city gone mad below. “Well, the good news is, with this many people affected, it’s a known issue. I’m sure the Google techs are already on top of it.”
A fly buzzed her annoyingly, and she swatted it out of the way. Managed to bat the meddlesome creature into her own eye. “Techa damn it!” Her eyes were watering up so bad she had no choice but to take out the contacts.
When she finally got the extra water out of her eyes with a couple more swipes of the backs of her hands, she looked up at the sky. That tidal wave wasn’t going anywhere. Its path as relentless as ever. “Honey, I don’t think we’re gonna hear from Google.”
“Screw that. This phone’s gotta have some self-evolving algorithm that can burrow past all their efforts to refuse to take customer assistance calls.” He flipped open his cell phone. “You find one of those tech basta
rds,” he said to the phone, “and you tell him I have a real bug up my ass. And I will not be kept waiting!”
“Yes, sir,” the phone AI said, emitting the satisfying sounds of a phone dialing at the other end. And then the busy signal. Before the phone tried redialing. Cornwall let out a roar of frustration.
The temperature must have dropped thirty degrees just in the last thirty seconds. She could feel the goosebumps on her skin popping up profusely as she rubbed her arms to get warm. The tsunami sirens sounded with increasing ferocity like a gaggle of wild turkeys in breeding season. The air never smelled so good. Myrna took a deep breath. The negative ions rushing to her brain triggered one of those after-exercise highs, ironically. His wife looked at her clueless husband, too focused on getting through to Google to notice any of the changes, and shook her head with impatience. “Well, you may as well go out the way you lived.”
***
Chancellor was surfing the tsunami wave bearing down on Manhattan, alongside at least a hundred fellow mad hatters, who weren’t about to escape the wave of a lifetime. Sure it would wipe out all life in the Big Apple it was bearing down on. But what the hell? Chancellor’s and his mates’ mindchips and their nano would see them through. Even if they died, in the cold water, they’d be kept chilled just well enough to give their mindchips and their nano nets all the time they needed to resurrect them. And the world they would inherit? Post-apocalyptic and then some! Chancellor couldn’t wait. It was like his favorite genre.
“Can you just see all the walking dead after today?” Petey, his surf mate, said on the board beside him, shouting over the roar of the wave. The only person more darkly tanned and more full of life than Chancellor was Petey, so they weren’t exactly qualified to speak at length on the walking dead look. All the same… Petey’s voice would never have reached Chancellor’s ears were it not for his augmented hearing which could initiate noise cancellation on command, courtesy of all the nano infesting his ear canal. “Their meat sacks rotting,” Petey added, “but their mindchips and nano nets keeping them marching on, going about their duties same as ever.”
Chancellor laughed, thinking about all the early generation transhumans without the latest upgrades who could scarcely hope for a better fate. “You know there won’t be any food for the longest while. They’ll have no choice but to eat the humans who didn’t get upgraded. Most of them killed off by the wave, but not everyone.”
“You got the HD capture on your contacts switched on?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“We’re gonna make a killing selling the raw footage, man, not to mention the edited films to the mainlanders living away from the coast.”
Chancellor nodded. “You know that’s gonna be a big deal, because I don’t think there’s going to be any UBI after today.”
“Shit! That’s right. You think this whole thing is a Republican play to win back the White House and Congress from the Greens and the Transhumanists? Put an end to UBI once and for all.”
“What else could it be?”
“Nah, fuck that. We’ll lobby the zombies, make sure they still vote to keep those UBI checks coming. If they can still pass the Turing Test, I don’t see how Congress can not count their votes.”
“All right, dude. You’re killing my buzz. We’ll sort this stuff later. Right now, get ready for the wave that keeps on giving.”
“Oh, yeah!” His friend lowered his polarized goggles, and crouched down on the board, ready for the wave to break. His muscles flexing like chorded steel cables. He was breathing through his entire body, just like his coach taught him. Feeling the board becoming a part of him. He was already so high he was giddy. That was all he needed was for his buzz to knock him on his ass before the wave finished breaking. No way he was going to have this moment stolen from him. With an iron will he dialed down his excitement. With all that self-control, he was stilling laughing his ass off, stopping only to howl with glee.
***
Electra throttled the motorcycle to full, racing between the stalled lanes of traffic. Her polished, faux-leather hell-kitty outfit designed as much to reduce air drag as to attract eyes. “You gonna steal a bike, Electra, you might want to look back from time to time to see who might be chasing after you.”
She checked her side view mirrors and saw the tidal wave bearing down on Manhattan. “Fuck me. I heard karma was a bitch, but not that she was fucking psychotic!”
The pandemonium on the streets was messing with her nice neat rows of cars she could slip between. Seeing her path blocked up ahead by more than one colliding vehicle, she had no choice but to get on top of the cars. From there it was a matter of turning the bumpy ride into a smooth one by accelerating better off the rooftops, so each time she landed she pond-skipped to another roof rather than having to ride the hills and valleys of cresting and rising windshields and bonnets between them.
The semi up ahead was going to put an end to Plan B soon enough. She gunned it so she could land on top of the trailer, riding the slope of a rear windshield. From there, she used the extra runway distance to pick up speed and do her Evil Knievel number from the top of one semi rig to another.
She could see her goal in the distance. If only she could get there in time. The bridge. The bridge to the mainland. One of many, but that was the only one she had a chance in hell of reaching. She set her sights on it and never lost focus, ignoring all the impediments along the way.
Like the snipers in the high-rises. They’d taken to killing people as mercy killings to save them the panic and slow deaths of drowning under the tidal wave. Some had real street cred with their rifles. One shot. One kill. The rest of the bozos just had automatic weapons they were itching to unload before they left his world, and “mercy” killings was as good an excuse as any to justify the horrific wastes of their disposable incomes.
Her bike had taken a hit from one of the Uzis. The self-healing metals weren’t terribly impressed. But she wasn’t sure she was going to survive an armor-penetrating sniper shell. She used the augmented vision her contacts gave her to calculate their vectors, and to stay to hell out of them. The red-line overlays making it look like she was cutting through some imaginary citywide infra-red security system.
Finally, there was just no ground below her anymore, either of the makeshift variety or the real variety, she could push off of without getting pinned in. With no choice left to her, she rotated the tires to fan blade mode, flew to hell out of there. But it was a costly move. The battery of the electric bike took to beating air a lot less than it took to chewing up asphalt.
A short while later, with her tires rotated back to grinding-asphalt mode, she landed on one of the suspension cables of the bridge. Rode it to the top so she could get the best vantage point on what was going on.
The tidal wave hadn’t slowed. And it hadn’t diminished much. If it didn’t continue to crash and lose height, even her perch on top of the bridge wasn’t going to be much protection.
She shook her head at the maniacs surfing the wave. They plunged to their deaths, smashed against the side of buildings like Jackson Pollock street art; the instant the “chalk” painting was laid down, the “rain” washed it away. The close-ups of their final moments brought to her courtesy of her mindchip, as she dialed into their points of view. Electra snorted. Maybe they were right. If it was the end, why not go out having a blast? They had the right idea. “Die like you lived, girl.”
With that last thought in mind, she throttled down on the bike, used the last of the battery charge to fly headlong off the “ramp” of the tension line, her wheels not exactly in air-bike mode—no energy for that—and straight into the wave.
***
Axelman, in radio communication with Johnson’s mindchip, cut away from the last moments of the lives Johnson was zeroed in on, of the people being swallowed up by the tidal waves hitting the cities around the world. Leastways he did after seeing Cornwall and Myrna, the husband thinking the whole time there was just a problem with his co
ntacts’ overlays, swallowing water when they gasped for air. Fighting the force of the wave just so they could find their way into each other’s arms for a parting kiss. Only to be savagely ripped out of each other’s arms by the force of the wave. Myrna watching her husband meet his end, impaled on a light pole poking through his midsection. As she sank to the bottom of a watery grave she would never quite reach. Her last conscious moment being that of a shark taking her from the waist down.
The surfer, Petey, and his friend, Chancellor, determined to get choice footage of the apocalypse, managed only very jerky, hand-held-camera-looking glimpses of their own ends. The one surfing the tabletops of a rooftop restaurant before being smashed against a brick wall, overwriting the graffiti artwork painted there, at least briefly, with a bloody rendering all his own. The other one, Chancellor, had the misfortune of landing on a roof with a radio tower. The electricity coursing through him, in conjunction with the water, kept him convulsing wildly long after he was dead.
As for Electra, she got to die as she lived. Her bike colliding head on in traffic. In this case, the “traffic” being an oncoming submarine from Mexico smuggling drugs. To her credit, she appreciated the irony in her final moment.
“Lovely. Just lovely!” Johnson said with a laugh that would chase ghosts out of a room.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Ferro hiked the remorseless, endless expanse of Saharan desert at high noon, the hottest part of the day, as was his routine; it was his midday constitutional. From a distance his worn, chocolate-colored, Bedouin-styled robes would have suggested a practiced desert survivor. If they only knew how practiced. The “robes” were in fact genetically modified flaps of skin meant to catch rainwater and cool him in turn. His one true adornment was his skull cap which required he shave his head daily to ensure it made the best possible connection with his mind. Its sole purpose to hack his own brain. It was a CRISPR unit of his own making. It could both show him what was going on in his own head and allow him to genetically modify himself on the fly. And that was why, right now, any satellite scanning for him wouldn’t know what to make of him. He had made himself cold-blooded, so there was an excellent chance he didn’t show up on any scans at all. His now sufficiently alien physiology moreover would not have come up as “human” on any monitor. At best they might confuse him with a desert lizard, a rather large one. A komodo dragon that had wandered far afield.
Convergence_ The Time Weavers Page 16