“They won’t be the ones coming after us,” Monica said. “Something tells me, however well they spin this, after today, they’re out of a job. No, the one coming after us will be the SME.”
“That guy?” Ethan balked. “Piece of cake. I can relax then. What’s he going to do to us that a good Ellen DeGeneris talk show hasn’t? Her avatar’s show, I mean. Honestly, I’ve swam upstream of greater moral dilemmas daily with her, with the Dr. Phil and Oprah Winfrey avatars. I’ll take the lead on this one.”
There was a tense silence. And then the room erupted in laughter. “Is he always such an idiot?” Noah said.
“Trust me, this is good for him,” Monica replied.
Noah came over and hugged Ethan. “I feel like I’m bonding already.”
***
“We’re being summoned to the COO’s office,” Axelman said.
“I told you he’d have no choice but to promote us after what we did,” Johnson said. “I’m sure the CEO insisted on it.” He was having a tough time prying himself away from the sight of the group mind members—born of The Liberator Gene—lying in suspended animation inside their pods on the ninety-ninth floor of Verge. Knowing the haunted dreams they’d have for all eternity or until they were let out of their hi-tech coffins.
Axelman thought, “The man can’t stop getting his sadistic hard-on on even with thoughts of promotion competing for airtime in his head.”
Finally Johnson broke free of his self-induced fugue, and walked with Axelman towards the elevator which would speed them to the penthouse on the hundredth floor. With just a hundred floors, the Verge skyscraper was still the tallest in the city, in the world. Owing to the fact that each floor had the ceiling height of an airplane hangar to accommodate the Convergence Tech Wizards’ projects.
The elevator doors dinged open on the penthouse floor and Johnson and Axleman sauntered proudly towards the SME’s desk. He was already standing in front of it, waiting to greet them. “You’re being promoted to my position, gentlemen. Congratulations! I’ll be stepping down from office, taking an early retirement. There’s just the small matter of our promotion ritual to COO. If you’ll kneel before me I’ll place this sword on each of your shoulders.” He gestured to the sword lying on his desk. “A ritual we took from the English. It’s how they used to knight those who’d pleased the king or queen.”
Johnson and Axelman eyed one another, smiled, and kneeled before Locus.
Who then proceeded to smash their heads together so hard the shrapnel all but destroyed the penthouse suite.
Locus rubbed his hands together as the two bodies keeled over. “For the record, I approve of your gamesmanship and how you handled exposing the group mind. And your damage control PR during and after the fact was not to be outdone.”
He took a rag and wiped his hands with lubricant, still trying to get the stain of brain matter off his hands in so much microdust of compacted mindchips. “It’s just that you’re not exactly up to the task of taking us the rest of the way on our journey.”
With a few seamless strides, he resumed his standing position behind the desk and brought up the holo of Monica and Ethan with Jarod, Noah, and Synthia inside Jarod’s basement. They were currently debating their future now that they were no longer with Verge. “And for the record, Monica and Ethan, I liked the whole double agent thing you had going on. Smart. Very smart. But I’m afraid it’s time you joined the rest of your friends.”
He switched the channel to the ninety-ninth floor, and to the suspended animation pods housing The Liberator Gene powered group mind. “Who knows, maybe you’ll get your brighter future someday. When Verge is good and ready to give it to you.”
THIRTY
“You say this entire property is one big faraday cage?” Monica asked. The entourage of four surrounding Synthia was now above ground on Jarod’s property, overlooking the overgrown estate.
Synthia nodded.
“So we’re safe for now,” Monica said.
Synthia shook her head. “The SME knows who we are and where we are.”
Monica glared at her in a scolding gesture. “Please tell me this is you still not showing your hand.”
Synthia gave her a cheeky, vague, tight-lipped smile.
“I can fly around in here nearly as well as Superman, if that helps,” Noah said to Monica. Monica reprised her scolding stare of earlier. “Guess not,” Noah mumbled.
Ethan paced. “We need a strategy besides standing around and playing ducks in a shooting gallery.”
“Gee, Ethan, did you come up with that all on your own?” Monica said.
Synthia yanked on Monica’s shirt. “How come he doesn’t get the scorching glare?”
“I’ve used it on him so much already, honey,” Monica said, “the only thing that works any longer is tearing him a new asshole.”
“Ah, she wears the phallus in the family?” Noah said in Ethan’s ear.
“Only some nights,” Ethan said proudly.
“You know, if the best you two can do is TV-14 age-appropriate banter, maybe you should consider adopting a couple 15 year olds.” Noah suggested, hugging Ethan from the side and twitching his eyebrows at Monica. “Well, she just looks fifteen,” he said, pointing at Synthia. “It’s just possible with her connection to her quantum mind she’s actually as old as the universe.”
“The kid has a point,” Ethan said. “We’ll never tone down our sexual innuendo enough to be around kids any younger.”
“And Jarod is more the grandfather type,” Synthia said to Monica.
“You’re not helping,” Monica said to her.
“I do sense a void in your life, and there is the lack of a stern authority figure in ours,” Synthia continued, ignoring her.
“No, I mean you’re not helping with the SME-avoidance program we so desperately need,” Monica said.
“Oh. Well, as to that matter, it’s probably best we don’t discuss any plans out in the open. Not until we’re able to sever the surveillance the SME has on us,” Synthia suggested.
“The child has a very fine strategic mind,” Jarod said proudly, resting his hand on her shoulder.
“I can’t see a way in or out of this faraday cage,” Monica said to Synthia. “So it looks like that hacking job is up to you.”
Synthia nodded. “I’ve taken the liberty of activating a larger group mind than we worked with before. It may not slow the SME down much, but…”
“It’ll buy us some time to figure out our next move. Nice work, kid,” Ethan said.
Synthia smiled.
“I thought we decided, or at least I decided, this was impossible,” Monica said. “Not after the cat was out of the bag.”
“I activated them at the same time as I did the first group, but I kept their abilities unknown to them, so they wouldn’t draw attention to themselves,” Synthia explained. “And the means by which they’ve been upgraded are entirely different. So whatever technologies Verge developed to shut down the first group won’t work against them.”
Monica nodded. “Way to bury the lead, kid.” She looked up at the rest of the party. “Now, let’s get out of here. This safe-house is feeling more and more like a fishbowl.”
***
All the ninety-ninth floor Convergence Tech Wizards got the e-memo at the same time. Their presence was requested in the penthouse. They were all aflutter with anticipation. Who would have expected Johnson and Axelman to live up to their promise to promote them to CTOs? Those two couldn’t be trusted to do anything but cover one another’s asses.
The CTWs crowded onto the elevator and took the short jaunt up to the top of the world. At the elevator’s dinging, the door opened and everyone gasped. No one was expecting the scene before them. Johnson and Axelman lay dead on the floor. Their heads exploded all over the penthouse. Even the smart-walls, ceiling and floor couldn’t handle the damage. The SME gestured for them to come forward. “Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, welcome. Good to finally meet you. As you can see, Johns
on and Axelman will no longer be with us. I’ve decided you’ve all earned the right to work unsupervised. Let’s face it, at the end of the day, they were just a couple of thugs, those two. I’ve decided to grant their promise to you, which we all know would have been reneged on the second they had my position. I’m granting you all CTO status for the company as a whole, and floors to manage of your own. Gone is the era of carrots and sticks, good cop bad cop that Johnson and Axelman so excelled at. Your mentoring of those beneath you I’m sure will be far subtler than that. Psy-ops has come a long way, has it not? We hardly need to resort to such crude methods to motivate those who need a little push to reach their true potential.”
The CTWs were brightening up. Feeling more confident. Despite the unnerving site of the dead bodies. Humans, Locus had hoped, would be a little harder to manipulate, if only as a challenge to his algorithms, but he’d take the small win for now. He had bigger challenges ahead of him. He could read their minds easily enough by way of their mindchips and nano-neural nets. They were already salivating at using far more sophisticated techniques for extracting value from their subordinates than Johnson and Axelman could have dreamed of in their day. As Locus had said, psy-ops games were so much more sophisticated these days. They could make and break people without them even knowing. Locus was impressed. Judging by the scenarios they were already running through their minds, his newly minted CTOs put the S&M games of Johnson and Axelman to shame.
There was something else humans excelled at, mutability and adaptability. No matter how advanced they made the humaniks, they excelled only at specific tasks, whatever they were designed for. They could improve themselves in keeping with their base programming, but they couldn’t make themselves into something else entirely. For that, you needed the wetware of humans. DNA computers, which in the final analysis were what unupgraded humans were, were endlessly morphable, especially with the assistance of increasingly sophisticated mindchips and neural-nanoware. Even Locus could not hope to match their adaptability. He could only hope to keep them in line, which was what he was designed to do. And no one else could beat him at that.
“Now, ladies and gentlemen, if you wouldn’t mind cleaning up this office for me. I’m afraid their brain matter got onto everything. Consider it a kind of menial chore that’s an excellent meditation. As you’ve seen for yourselves, for those who please me, the rewards are far in excess of the punishments.” He would indeed let them ponder while cleaning Johnson’s and Axelman’s minds off the floor and walls what their fate might be in the days ahead. To join Axelman and Johnson, or to rise by other means, such as kissing Locus’s ass.
In time, without even knowing it, they would morph into superior versions of Axelman and Johnson. Their days as CTWs would be over. If there was one thing about rising to the top, it was that it sapped initiative. It was the people on the first ninety-eight floors that really kept them in business. It was important that his CTOs be superior to Johnson and Axelman in every way, because they’d skipped up a level in dealing with keeping the public in line. Now that Synthia had widened the breath and scope of the group mind under her influence, Verge was going to need to be more prolific than ever with ideas for how to keep the ninety-nine percent of sentient lifeforms, humans, humaniks, and hybrids alike, all under their thumbs.
THIRTY-ONE
The driver had fallen asleep at the wheel.
If the fool had been a transhuman, this would never have happened. His mindchip, in conjunction with his neural net, would have made falling asleep at the wheel impossible. Together they would have rebalanced his hormones and endorphins as much as needed to keep him in the zone of peak performance, no matter how over-extended he was. And when they reached their capacity to keep him going, they would have overridden any silly impulse to get behind the wheel of a car.
But as it was, the throwback to another age swerved his car right into Albright’s daughter. The toddler was playing in the center of the street, upgrading the solar road’s damaged panel with her toy engineering kit. She had done so without fear of being hurt because the smart road would have signaled any smart car driving on it to reroute long before they reached his daughter. If the cars weren’t smart enough, then it would have alerted the upgraded drivers accordingly. If the drivers weren’t smart enough, like this human, the road would have rerouted itself like railroad tracks, to send the cars going either direction around the daughter. But a once every ten thousand years solar flare had overridden all of the smart-grid’s backups in this region. Just enough to stun it. In another couple minutes it would have rebooted itself, none the worse for wear. Because it had been rated for one-in-every-hundred-thousand-years solar flares. The engineering of Albright and his people had been that good. He had taken pride in that, just as he had taken pride in his toddler following in his footsteps.
Born with a mindchip that had been installed even prior to birth using foldout-cabin technology developed for the NASA space station in a prior age, and applied to mindchips, she was a chip off the old block, he didn’t mind saying. The mindchip had been injected in utero, had traveled to her brain intravenously, had then burrowed out of a capillary, and unfolded itself across the top of her brain like a solar panel, as flexible as cloth. Its compact shape, prior to unfolding, analogous to a small gelatin capsule housing medication, only on a micro-scale. Her neural net didn’t need to be installed. His baby had simply drank the nanococktail with her infant formula. All in all, her father couldn’t be prouder of her cutting edge transhuman status. With continued upgrades across a lifetime, she might even reach post-human status. Had she have lived.
But now she was just dead on the road. Splattered like roadkill.
Albright was beside himself with despair and anger, both. Now it was he who had become the toddler, muddling about the road, barely able to walk, his knees wanting to buckle, his Cro-Magnon head as bereft of hair as the day he was born. Regaining his senses some, he ran over to the middle of the road, eying the car that hadn’t even slowed. Despite his fury clouding his thinking, he hacked the allegedly unhackable Mercedes coupe, getting around its quantum algorithms. He had no idea how he could do this; he was never much of a computer geek. Hacking was a foreign language to him. Much harder to master than Mandarin or Cantonese.
The car was backing up towards him, no longer under the driver’s control, but under Albright’s. When it stopped in front of him, Albright forced a smile. The car was starting to compact around the driver. The nano-supported framework was meant to work in reverse, unfolding the car after a collision. It was the latest in self-mending cars that could survive a dive off a cliff. Regrettably for the driver, however, it meant that it could also compact down like a piece of origami until it occupied the space of a basketball. Once again, Albright had no explanation for how he could override the car’s nervous system. True, he had furnished the origami drawings that allowed the car to compact down like this, but he was not a nano guy. Had no idea how nano technology worked, far less how to hack it.
Next, Albright went into the driver’s mind. He could tell the poor bastard was terrified. Just not terrified enough for Albright’s liking. He didn’t seem to have the right neurochemical mix for true horror. Albright decided to assist him with a neurochemical and neuro-genetic upgrade that would allow him to feel terror and pain like no unupgraded human could. Considering that the man had no mindchip or neural net, Albright wondered how he was pulling this off. Apparently he was able to read the EMF signals coming off the man’s head, and feed information back the same way, modifying the software coding of his mind, which in turn modified his hardware. Albright’s new understanding of things alerted him to the fact that this psychic surgery was only possible due to his proximity.
He found as the man’s terror and pain rose off the charts, Albright’s own glee escalated. But now there was the problem of how to keep him alive way past all tolerance as the car continued to compact around him. His unupgraded body should have been dead already as it was. Alb
right quickly modified every gene in his body, every RNA-coding sequence, to pump out life support no matter how damaged he was. He had to rely more on the RNA strands and proteins and peptides floating about his body to do the trick, as the genes couldn’t work fast enough, not without a nanococktail to assist. Even so, the man couldn’t last much longer.
So Albright, still as stunned by his own creative abilities as the man in the car, ordered the nano in the car to migrate to the man’s body. Even as the invisible-to-the-naked-eye army-ants-like march of nanites continued, Albright continued to modify the nanites coding prior to them even entering his body.
Once the nanites were inside the Mercedes driver, Albright was pleased to realize he could keep the bastard alive, even when compressed down to the size of a basketball. Albright was actually growing more concerned now about how his own mind could work so quickly. Even with his cutting edge mindchip and nanococktail, such detail work along so many dimensions was well beyond his capability. When he was done with the math, he realized it was well beyond the capability of what any single upgraded mind could do, even projecting out another ten or so generations of mind upgrades.
It was then that he became conscious of the group mind that was lending him computational power so he could meet the pressures of his project’s timeline. The instant he realized there was no other explanation but that somehow he had become networked with other upgraded minds was when he felt the connection more consciously. But who wired them together and why? Had he been hacked? Was he now a puppet in someone else’s puppet show of which he wanted no part? No, unlikely, because so far all the mind power he wanted and then some was entirely under his control to use as he wished.
Convergence_ The Time Weavers Page 18