Retro studied the effects on his fallen fellow scientists by hacking their mindchips and their nano nets, both of which were still working away at the problem of how to neutralize the toxin, and possibly restore life to the fallen. They weren’t making much headway. Retro immediately realized why. They lacked the right stuff to fix the problem, to bring their hosts back from the dead. Why he knew at an instant what he was confronting was a long story.
He hadn’t been born a CTW. Something had happened to him, someone had seeded his mind with the ability. And not too long ago. In fact, prior to arriving on Mars, he was officially classified as an STW. When he decided he wanted to know what underlay his newfound CTW abilities and started examining his own mind with the scanners he initially found nothing of interest. But with his new abilities, he could evolve those scanners’ abilities to see inside his head by generations overnight. Soon he had set them to the task of evolving themselves with self-evolving algorithms. They proved even better at the task then him. He finally found what he was looking for.
His brain was capable of producing a compound that concentrated itself at the neuronal synapses. Where it acted enzymatically to greatly increase neuronal transmission and the ability of neuronal webs to interact with and inform one another. It also grew those neuronal webs, making them ever-denser and ever more interconnected. In no amount of time his brain looked like an infant’s before the brain started to prune unnecessary neuronal connections that weren’t being used and stimulated and were not associated with survival. This biological brain couldn’t keep up with his mindchip, as souped up as it was, but it was the source of his ability to see big picture gestalts when others didn’t.
He had since tried many times to isolate this biochemical and transplant it to the minds of his workmates. He had never succeeded. Even with continued injections, the baseline neurochemical would continue to fall off before it could do much good. For some unknown reason the immune systems of the STWs fought it. Just why they resisted the CTW compound was a subject of intensive study on Sub-Level 4 of this complex. Now it appeared, the compound was what was keeping him alive. It gave him a natural immunity to the Mars RNA-virus that one of their teammates had unwittingly activated and sicced on the rest of them.
Something was very suspicious about the nature of this RNA retrovirus. But before he could explore that, he needed to know if anyone besides him had survived. He got on the comms and put out a system-wide call to arms. “If anyone can hear this, please know that I’m the last person alive on Level 3. Stay off this level until further notice.” He set the tape to repeat, also sounded the alarm, and scanned the security cameras on the other levels.
The cameras showed him what he needed to know. The others were all dead. Once he was satisfied by the body count that there was no one unaccounted for, he shut down the alarm and the repeating message.
He felt ashamed. He’d always looked down his nose at STWs, made nasty cracks about them being dinosaurs, an evolutionary throwback to a bygone age. He, in fact, was the genetic freak. Maybe he’d been so unkind as a defensive mechanism, because he knew surely they were thinking the same thing about him. He would mourn his own lack of empathy later, just like he would grieve the loss of the others, only when the opportunity afforded.
Right now he was hyperventilating. He was going to pass out if he didn’t calm down. His blood pressure and other vital signs were through the roof. He wondered why his mindchip and nano net hadn’t already neutralized his overexcited state. And then he remembered. He’d specifically asked them not to. It was their job to keep him in the zone twenty-four seven so he could perform his scientific tasks at peak functioning level. But they were a little too efficient at their jobs. He was getting tired of feeling numb or as if he was on Xanax all day. He wanted to share in the excitement of the others, their ups and downs. They too had chosen to throttle down their homeostatic mechanisms in favor of a wider range of human responses that made them feel more human even if it cut into their productivity.
It was a lovely sentiment. One he didn’t have time for right now. He normalized all his systems, threw himself into peak-performance state in a matter of seconds and set about addressing the mystery of the errant RNA molecule.
There had been rumors of landings on Mars prior to NASA and SPACE-X setting foot here. Private, off-the-books black ops missions headed by corporations. Their mission: to ensure no CTWs survived Mars. The last thing anyone wanted was for a Convergence Tech Wizard to set up shop this close to earth. That meant the likelihood of a technological arms race that could threaten all life on Earth if Mars ever decided to take them over. Of course it would be one CTW against legions back on Earth. But since there seemed to be no upper limit to what any of these guys could do, and because, unsupervised, they were given to the runaway effects of their own minds, any one had the potential to be planet killers. Their minds were treated like singularity engines. Empower them with an army of STWs and it would only feed the reaction. And Techa forbid, one of those CTWs figured out how to make any STW into a CTW like he was trying to do… Well, that was grounds for blowing Mars to bits. There was reportedly any number of backup plans to that end. But corporations had since gone the way of the dodo, their holdings returned to the public sphere. Last he checked, Verge alone remained, and even it was closely supervised by Anonymous, Sousveillance, and other humanitarian organizations ready to pounce on it and turn it into another public trust at a moment’s notice.
Even if he was right, if anything, he should be the one dead, and everyone else would be fine. So what was he missing?
There was a disturbance in the compound. The floor he was standing on was shaking. The ceiling crumbling. Tiles were falling from overhead.
He checked the monitors. The crane had detached itself from the door leading to the surface of the planet. It had repurposed itself as a wrecking machine, and was currently tearing through the compound, destroying every device it could get its hands on.
And it was headed his way.
THIRTY-FOUR
“That’s the last thing I need,” Retro thought, eying the crane bot demolishing the Martian compound. He only had himself to count on now for survival, and he was going to need every helpful device he could get his hands on.
Of his many levels of expertise, computer hacking wasn’t one of them, nor was robotics. He had no doubt he could bring himself up to speed in both fields in time to impress even a transhuman, just not in time to keep himself alive.
He rushed to his bedroom chamber on Sub Level-3.
Pulled the drape off the transparent cylinder.
Inside was a sex doll. The molded white polymer surfaces doing a poor job of hiding her insides, which remained exposed at the shoulders, forearms, belly, back of the head, and, of course, the joints. He’d had one of the 3D printers churn him out one based on a design he himself had made. She was a robot and looked every bit the part, despite her sexy, beguiling female form that was just suggestive enough to make him forget she was a robot. He’d thought of going with a humanik, a robot inside of a skin suit, but he fancied her better. Maybe mating with machines was replacing bestiality for taboo sex fantasies now that less people lived on farms and more people worked with robots.
Ripping the cylinder door open, he activated her with the press of a button. She opened her eyes and fixed them on him. “I need you to defend me,” he said. “An errant crane-bot is tearing the place apart. Do you come with any combat algorithms?”
“My S&M protocols should suffice.” She stepped out of the cylinder, with one hand, swept him behind her in a defensive posture, and isolated the source of the threat, solely by tracking the vibrations back to their source. “It’s reached Sub-Level 3. It’s perhaps best you descend to Sub-Level 4 while I take care of this.”
“Yes, ma’am. You’ll find I have no trouble playing the submissive in any context.” Retro ran to the elevator and descended to the next level.
From there, he watched what was transpiring
on Sub Level-3. The Crane Bot had morphed into a humanik of sorts, humanoid in outline, just missing the skin suit. He towered over Retro’s sexbot. His slower, stronger punches and stiffer movements owing to his size, were being matched by her more nimble acrobatic fighting with plenty of flips. Almost like watching a kickboxer go at a Capoeira martial arts fighter from Brazil.
Every time the crane bot managed to get his hands on her, it looked like it was all over. He was just that much stronger. But she was very good at David and Goliath games, perhaps owing to her S&M protocols.
***
Nova—that was the name she’d given herself at birth, upon opening her eyes and finding herself to be a sexbot—felt the electron streams flowing to her brain slowing. It didn’t take a genius to realize it had to do with the Crane Bot, currently in commando mode, clamping down on the cables in her neck. Her sensors flickered. Light transmissions to her brain grew increasingly intermittent. Like film sticking in a projector. And burning.
The smoke her sensors detected didn’t arise from the burning film in her head, however. It arose from the acid secretions in the Crane Bot’s hands, aimed at severing her head one way or the other, eating away at the metal cords in her neck. Evidently he’d chemically adjusted his lubricants on the fly to serve a higher purpose.
She reached her hand behind her, grabbed him behind the neck, and flipped him over on his back. Immediately rotated him on the floor by snapping his neck so hard his body had no choice but to follow. She’d meant to snap his neck. No such luck, she went for plan B, and pulled back on his head, using the front of his face for leverage. Until she had his spine good and arched to where she finally heard it snap.
Releasing her decommissioned adversary, she went over to the nearest 3D printer and commenced the repair work to her neck, swapping out the parts the acid had eaten away. She’d been sending signals to the printer the instant she felt the acid on her neck.
Feeling quite smug and superior to the Crane Bot in every way, she turned in time to see he’d pulled the same trick on her, and had swapped out his spine with one from one of the 3D printers. He may not have had much mobility post the spine-snapping incident, but apparently he had had enough. She grimaced.
When he came at her with his lumbering mitts, she got in close. At nearly twice her size, keeping up was a real challenge for him, even if all it took was one blow to make her rethink her whole hardware configuration. And from there peppered him with rapid-fire punches until she’d dented his armoring enough to pull it off. She ducked in and out like a stinging bee, each time before he could get his telescoped punches on her. She did the same thing with him from behind, ultimately peeling away his back panel. When he did manage to clock her, and she buckled to her knees, as once again the flow of electrons reaching her mindchip slowed to a trickle, she did her rapid-fire punches at his legs until she’d pulled away his leg armoring.
As Crane Bot decided to put her in a clinch to tie up her arms, she used the wrestling hold and the fact that they were now inseparably intertwined on the floor to pull away his now exposed cabling. She bounded off of him leaving his limbs flailing in slow motion and not particularly coordinated with much of his wiring torn out.
Nova set about remodeling her face with the 3D printer that spelled an end to her sexbot days otherwise. Convinced there was no coming back from the dead for him this time, she paid him little mind. It wasn’t like he was going to reach a 3D printer from where she’d left him on the floor.
Finished with her makeover, she threw him one last look, only to find he’d summoned a small army of assistants, the maintenance droids, customarily tasked with tidying up the place, and had repurposed them to attend him as surgeons. Fitting the 3D printed replacement parts to his body.
She threw him a fake smile. “You’re lucky I don’t severe your communications channel to those printers. But as it turns out, my pet human is very aroused by our foreplay. And a happy pet is a well-behaved pet,” she said, lunging for him with the intent of seeing how well he fought without his eyes.
***
Retro watched the sexbot and the Crane Bot switch one death-grip hold or wrestling pin after another. Neither of them should have been able to snake out of certain death. But they did. About this time, Retro was starting to realize he rather enjoyed robot wrestling, robot boxing, robot Ju-Jitsu, robot ultimate mixed martial arts fighting, all of which were on display on his monitor in rapid succession.
Their tussles cost them mightily, but they’d each wirelessly signaled the 3D printers in the room to cough up spare parts they could switch out nearly as rapidly as they got damaged. All Retro needed to do was come up with a point system, and he might very well have an excuse to stop working altogether in favor of his new favorite pastime.
When he found himself with a bag of popcorn in his hands and no idea how it got there, and his feet up on the table, absorbed in the monitor, he laughed. When he reached for his sixteen ounce juice cup, that’s when he saw all the dead bodies on the floor that had escaped his peripheral vision earlier, or perhaps his tunnel vision. He sighed, put down the cup, and more responsibly returned to the mystery of the RNA retrovirus that had stolen his friends’ lives.
He didn’t get much farther contemplating its true meaning when he realized it could still turn on him. It could mutate, learn how to get around his defenses. They’d always been vulnerable up here to situations arising which the group mind couldn’t tackle. That’s why they always welcomed more immigrants. There was security in numbers. Now that there was just him, more than ever, they needed a workaround. What if he hadn’t had the sexbot on hand? Even a CTW could get over his head quickly this far away from any support system.
Communications with Earth often took hours, longer depending on where Mars was relative to Earth in its orbit around the sun. Moving retired satellites into the communications channel between planets to serve as relay and booster stations had gotten those communications down from days or longer. But they had a long way to go to have anything close to real-time communications. And what if you couldn’t afford to wait for an answer? The sight on the monitor of the sexbot and the cranebot going at it just confirmed his concerns.
That’s when he remembered the “Open Me for Real Time Solutions” box. It had said Verge on it, which is why no one had bothered to open it. No one was about to get in bed with a corporation if they didn’t have to. No one knew what its workaround was to a lack of real time communications with Earth, and at the time, no one cared. It didn’t seem worth the risk. So they’d slid it under a desk and… Oh shit! It was in the room with the fighting robots!
Retro peeled his feet off the desktop and ran in their direction. He had to get it out of there before their brawling put an end to his one true chance of survival. Yes, they had pulsed communications with Earth that brought the sum total of human knowledge shared on the internet into sync with what they had on Mars. But those periodic updates only happened once every year or so; they were so data intensive and they clogged the communications channels, which people preferred to keep open to dialogue with loved ones. In a year, what’s more, the state of the art could change so much, you may as well be working with tech fixes on their local database that was a hundred years out of date by the standards of late 20th century progress.
He was in the room with the two robot warriors. Every time he tried to reach the desk in question he got batted backwards, either unwittingly, or deliberately. Just getting thrown a safer distance away was taxing the hell out of his medical nano. Two broken ribs, one broken arm, a black eye, head concussion, and that was just after three failed attempts to reach the box.
When he finally got his hands on the steel case, the crane bot cum humanik got him in his hands, dangling him off the ground by the neck. Only the severed tendons in that arm, ripped out by the sexbot was keeping Retro alive. Crane Bot was trying to work his way around the severed connections with his programming. Just as he re-engaged the one twitchable finger—which is al
l it would have taken to rip Retro’s windpipe out—Sexbot pulled the wires in crane bot’s brain first, the ones attached to his mindchip, which she then crushed in her hand.
“Good one,” Retro managed despite the sounds having trouble getting out of his mouth. Sexbot pried the robot’s hand off him.
“I suppose you want me to fix him and put him in storage until you’re ready for more big time wrestling, robot style,” she said.
“How did you know?”
“I’m wired into the compound’s communications system. I could see you watching us on the monitors and getting all excited.”
“Uhm,” he said, feeling embarrassed and exposed before he caught himself. “Yeah, if you wouldn’t mind,” Retro said. “While you’re doing that I’m going to see if this box I’m holding can do any more to increase our survival chances.”
Without further ado, she reassembled one of the workbenches that had folded up under the duress of robot combat, and tossed the crane bot on top of it for surgical repairs.
He returned to the privacy of his domicile, set the box down in front of him on his work desk. Eyed the INSTA-FIX in big letters and the rest of the inscription that he remembered verbatim in smaller text. “Verge” being the word in the smallest text of all.
Took a deep breath.
And opened the box.
THIRTY-FIVE
“Hi, Retro.”
Retro took a step back. How did the box know who he was? “Hi,” he said cautiously. “Who, what are you?”
“My name is Locus. I’m a SME.”
Retro ran the rolodex of acronyms through his head until he got to the one that seemed most pertinent. A Supersentient-Morality-Engine?”
Convergence_ The Time Weavers Page 21