Ethan handed her an egg and he readied himself with the coffee table from the living room. His straining sounds and tortured looks seemed to communicate he really hoped she was ready at her end. “Now!” he said.
They watched the egg and the coffee table descend together. The egg landed first. “I’ll be damned,” she said.
“If I were Galileo, I wouldn’t have discovered gravity. I would have decided that God is an egg. And chickens were therefore to be considered sacred.”
She missed the beat. It just took longer than ever for the chuckle to escape her lips. It had to bob up from the gravity well it had gotten stuck in, a mood perhaps even darker than his. And why not, the failure was even more hers. She’d failed to save Synthia. She’d failed to neutralize the Nano Man. She’d failed to save the last of the CTWs—well, the last of the free thinkers among them anyway who hadn’t sold their souls to Verge.
“What’s with the sink?” Ethan said.
It had cracked into about six pieces, was currently annealing itself. And it had summoned a quadcopter to return it to its resting place in the bathroom. The quadcopter was currently navigating the front door, conferring with it in hopes of being let in. The door seemed to like it better than it liked Ethan, and complied. Looking over their shoulders at the remodeling project underway without any intervention from them, Monica said, “It’s one of those earthquake and cyclone-proof sinks.”
“And the coffee table?” Ethan said, his eyes returning to the demolition site below.
The coffee table had found its legs again and was scurrying up the steps to Ethan’s apartment on its own. It moved like a possessed arachnid. “Yeah, that’s just weird,” Monica said.
Ethan sighed. “They’re just taking all the fun right out of this exercise.”
“It’s probably just as well. Not right you punishing your belongings for our mistakes.”
“I’m so numb right now, I can only feel pain through my ravaged possessions. The therapy is working, so leave me alone, thank you. I may graduate up to animals next, and who knows, even humans, if it’s the only way to get in touch with my own anguish.”
She decided whoever said, “Misery loves company” was a moron, and slinked back into the apartment.
***
Ethan tried launching the toaster and the microwave off the balcony next. They barely had time land before a robo-ambulance pulled up. It unfolded from vehicle mode into a humanik-2, a robot that looked only vaguely human in outline. After some of the original humaniks had rebelled against their skin suits, either tearing them off entirely, or wearing patches of them the way conquering warriors tasted the flesh of their enemy, the humanik-2 came on line. They didn’t have any human skin suit from the get-go. Ethan sighed and said, “Okay, which one called 911 on me?”
“The toaster, sir. He’s this year’s model, comes with a complete robots-rights upgrade. If you don’t desist I’m going to have to take you in.”
“Fine. I was losing my passion for beating up on inanimate objects anyway.”
“Who’s he calling inanimate?” the toaster said.
“I know he’s not referring to me!” the microwave said.
The humanik-2 was busy performing surgery on both of them. He’d grown an extra pair of arms to help him with the multitasking. Or rather, unfolded them, origami-like, from his torso, where they’d been hiding. “You’re an ambulance?” Ethan said.
“Yes, sir,” replied the humanik-2, “occasional policeman, State Militia, soldier…”
“Yeah, I remember when humans had to work like six jobs not to get by, before someone thought up of Universal Basic Income. Now look at me. I have the time to prove myself a failure at all kinds of things that I never had the time for before.” Ethan resumed his drinking straight out of the Jack Daniels bottle.
“I know you’re not looking for pity from me,” the humanik-2 said without even bothering to look up from his tool work on the toaster and the microwave.
“Want to come up for a drink? I hate to drink alone.” Ethan belched.
“My sensors say you’re with your girlfriend. She was married before, you know?”
“Really?” Ethan turned in her direction, gazing inside the apartment with a furrowed brow.
“He was exactly like you. That’s why she’s a bit afraid to commit to a long-term relationship with you. She knows from experience it just doesn’t work.”
Ethan frowned. “Appreciate you doctoring me too, buddy, but you can stop now. I still say you can come up if you want. According to you I am living alone, I just don’t know it yet.”
The humanik-2 finally looked up and grimaced. “Not a big fan of the projects. Hate to sound bigoted about it, but the whole place makes my metal-alloy skin feel like it’s melting.”
“What do you mean ‘the projects’?”
“You do realize you’re like the poorest people on earth?”
“I have a talking fridge and a talking stove and a… hell, I think everything talks, except for my girlfriend. Who prefers to shout at me.”
“Yeah, it’s part of the expanded human rights package as of last year. You do know that, as a percentage of all technological breakthroughs on the planet, the UBI base climbs annually?”
“Um, yes,” Ethan said feeling like a fool. Yes, he did know that. He just hadn’t kept up with what the basic allotment was these days. “You say I’m the poorest of the poor?”
The humanik-2 reprised his grimace. “If it’s any consolation, I feel sorry for you.”
“What’s so distasteful about the way I live? Hell, until you told me otherwise, I thought I was king of the hill.”
“This place is very dangerous to my kind. If I fall in a swimming pool, there’s no smart water to keep the chlorine away from my lubricated parts. Did you know a meteor could land on your head and take you out? And each day they up the statistical probability of that. The newer cities just move out of the way, but here, your buildings aren’t that upgraded. To say nothing of a total lack of magnetosphere shielding.”
“Magnetosphere shielding?”
“Yeah, the Google global faraday cage can pulse and bolster the magnetosphere anywhere on the planet as needed to help repel meteors. But it’s not like there aren’t holes in the net. You’re in one of them.” The humanik-2 shuddered at the thought. “Honestly, the only reason I’m not running for my life right now is I come with self-evolving algorithms to help with the pains of awareness.”
“Hey, can I borrow some of those?”
“They’re only available to later-model transhumans. I think it’s part of the incentive program to re-up every year. You can bet Microsoft thought of that one.”
Ethan sighed. The insides of his nostrils were becoming inflamed from all the sighing he was doing lately. “Thanks, pal. I appreciate you helping me find my way back to the pit of my despair. If I’d escaped too early, I’d just have to punish myself all over again.”
“Don’t mention it,” the humanik-2 said, putting the microwave and the toaster down. They walked up the stairs heading back to the apartment on their own.
“Sorry guys!” Ethan said, throwing his voice at the appliances.
“Yeah, yeah,” he heard from both of them, neither sounding particularly convinced he was feeling any less of a reprobate, or perhaps just not willing to forgive him yet.
The humanik-2 gave the neighborhood one last look, shuddered, shapeshifted back to ambulance mode, and high-tailed it out of there.
***
Ethan entered the apartment from the patio, found Monica lying on her back on the floor, throwing darts at his face on the ceiling. “Where did that painting of me come from?” he said.
“The house paint was obliging enough to paint you there for me.”
Ethan made a sour face. “The fact that you can only get in touch with your pain through hurting me is vaguely satisfying. At least we know we’re on similar wavelengths.” He set the empty Jack Daniels bottle down on the counter. “Oh, and f
or what it’s worth, there’s no escaping this self-pity. Repression and avoidance do not work.”
“Why is it I’m so strangely relieved to hear that?”
“I’d tell you my theory but it’d just amount to more avoidance.” He collapsed on the sofa. He gave the couch the once over. “Can this thing override its flame retardance to burn me alive?”
“Don’t tempt it.”
He glared at her. “As much as I hate to interrupt our suicidal despair, when were you going to tell me you were married?! And to someone just like me! And that’s why you’re afraid of committing!” He was gesturing so hard he accidentally poked himself in the eye, causing it to water and for him to tear up further. As he rubbed away at the eye futilely, it just caused the other one to tear up in sympathy. The irony did not escape him.
She glared back at him. “Never, now that you already have all the answers.”
“So you have a type! Big deal! Everyone’s got a type.” He mumbled the last part, “Doesn’t mean every minxy blond I meet is going to be an ass-kicking ninja cyberchick. Don’t see me judging!”
“Now is not the time, Ethan.”
“Fine, but we’re not done with this by a long shot. Somewhere between saving the world, and grabbing gratuitous, grunge, degaussing, de-stressing sex in abundance, we’re going to settle this once and for all.”
They must have decided that neither of them had the energy to deal with one another further because they both stopped talking at the same time.
He curled up on the sofa and tried to sleep.
Some indeterminable time later he shot up and screamed, “I can’t sleep!”
“You only now figured that out? I have been not sleeping for days.”
“I will lose my mind to this, but I will not lose my soul!”
“Speak for yourself.”
Ethan vaulted off the sofa and paced. “We had to have gone wrong somewhere. We just have to figure out where that was.”
“We were just bested, Ethan, that simple. On the plus side, the world is pretty much as it was, so no real adjustment for either of us to make. The adjustment would have come later, if we hadn’t failed at our mission.”
“What if we didn’t fail? It was just, you know, a temporary setback?”
She stopped throwing her darts at the ceiling long enough to throw one at him. It wedged in his shoulder where it hung limply for lack of proper penetration. He continued pacing and brainstorming with himself unaware that she was now turning him into a human dartboard. The face on the ceiling for its part, cried tears of darts back at her so she didn’t have to climb up on a ladder to retrieve them, thus interrupting her depression with such unwanted purposefulness.
“Roll the film back in your head,” Ethan said. “To that first encounter. What did Orion say? You were one of them. You were a CTW. You just couldn’t see it because you hated them so much. And, well, because as CTWs go, you’re like a Model T and they’re like a Lamborghini Especial.”
She hit him with another dart. Not so much for anything he said, okay, maybe for what he was saying, but more so he’d snap out of this fake hopefulness, which she was convinced was just the latest round of pointless distraction from their despair. The latest dart dangled limply from one of his ab muscles. The fact that he was shirtless was something she appreciated. It made it easier to avoid puncturing a lung. She wasn’t that mad at him yet.
“So, who’s to say you can’t just pick up from where Synthia left off?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe that she was the most advanced of her kind, and I’m the most primitive.” She flung this dart at him harder than the rest, was lucky it didn’t pierce an artery landing in his bicep. You’d think he’d notice the pain every time he flexed that hand to run his hand through his hair to help him think. But no.
“But that’s perfect! Don’t you see? It’s your m.o. to hate yourself for not being one of them. Now that you can’t really hate them anymore, all that hate’s got nowhere to go but right back at you, or you get to displace it pointlessly and far less therapeutically at me on the ceiling there.” He paced a couple more laps before the next idea came. Maybe his blood sugar was low. Maybe this was just life a few transhumanist generations behind her.
“The only way for you to heal yourself, to ever truly be who you are, who you’ve always dreamt of being is by taking over where Synthia left off. Doesn’t matter how impossible the task; for you, it’s the only way forward.”
She was getting ready to throw her latest dart at him harder than she’d thrown any of the others before when instead she squeezed it hard as if she might just crush it. And she sprang up from the floor. “You’re right.”
“I am?” He smiled slowly when confidence overcame reticence. “So what’s our next step then?”
“I have no idea. But I’m guessing it’s something only a Model T would think of, and not a Lamborghini Especial.”
“I hope you appreciate that that analogy probably wouldn’t work at all if it weren’t for talking cars.”
FORTY-SIX
Ethan eyed the edges of the lake. He didn’t think it was possible to get that far away from the shore in a boat you peddled with your feet designed mostly for kids and enterprising parents with children. “If we were trying to cure ourselves of hopelessness, I think we picked the wrong activity.”
Monica didn’t respond. The furious peddling was centering her. She was either lost in thought or lost in peddling, Ethan wasn’t sure which. Speaking for himself, his feet were just going along for the ride now on her peddle-motion. He was down to counting waves.
Finally, her bubble of energy burst. She stopped cold and panted like a racehorse who’d just won the Kentucky Derby instead of stranding them in the middle of nowhere—the actual middle of nowhere, not the proverbial one. “I give up. This is as close as you’re going to get to any black hole effect my mind can generate,” she said.
He gulped looking out at “the event horizon” of the shoreline, realizing that the lake, if not her mind, would swallow up all time in any effort they cared to expend getting back to land. So, yeah, kind of black hole-like.
“Forget the black hole analogy everyone likes to use to describe the inner workings of a CTW’s mind, or keep it, I don’t know,” he said. “But what’s the black hole doing? It’s weaving together time, past, present, future, into its own indelible mix.
“To be a true Convergence Tech Wizard you have to learn to become a Time Weaver. So, what are the strands of technology you can pull together right now that would create something that shouldn’t exist for another hundred years? Why, because as obvious as it is to you, others can’t seem to make the connection.”
“I know you’re just trying to be helpful but…”
“What’s the road look like to the Model T, not the Lamborghini Especial?”
“It looks even longer and our destination even further off.” She sighed and groaned in one as she resumed her peddling, slower this time; she was spent.
“Our destination is simple,” he said, “figure out how to up the percentage of people on the planet who can be turned into CTWs from two percent to one hundred percent. No way even the Nano Man is going to put all those cats back in the bag. Even if he could, no point wiping out your entire customer base if there’s no one left to sell to. And how are we going to achieve this lofty goal when far brainier types have tried and failed? By pulling together say three strands of technology in your head to create the breakthrough instead of dozens or hundreds the way a true CTW would. Less is more, babe. Trust me on this.”
“The low hanging fruit would have been picked long ago.” Each word that came out of her was powered by a panting breath.
“Not if all the fruit-picking machines are designed on that premise, so don’t even bother to check the lower branches anymore!”
***
Ethan’s impatience with Monica was registering in the rising timbre and volume of his voice each time he opened his mouth. Hers was coming a
cross more as a desire to push him out of the boat. If he could read her face better, he’d know she was determined to do it with the force of telekinesis alone.
That’s when it dawned on her.
Synthia had been designed by an unupgraded mind. And she’d been given only three strands of technology to work with. The CRISPR gene-editing capacity to forge a 1000IQ, the nanotech ability to make the body more responsive to the mindchip—the nextgen mindchip being strand three—so the mindchip could evolve itself and the body at far faster rates, and far more flexibly than ever before.
Synthia had worked her magic, what’s more, with just these three strands by maintaining a semi-coma state that allowed her superior connection with her unconscious. Not just any strata of the unconscious mind, but the very lowest band, the frequency believed to connect with the quantum flux, that part of the mind that allegedly connected to everything in the multiverse thanks to the poorly understood laws of non-locality.
“Okay, I can do this,” she said. “I’ll be damned if I can’t.”
“Really? How?”
She was ready to throw him out of the foot-peddle boat again. He had supreme confidence when it came to their future together, until someone called him on one of his ideas and he realized he was just talking a good game, hoping no one would notice, least of all him.
“Synthia used just three strands to accomplish what she did. Well, four if you count the access to the quantum mind. I’m going to use five.”
“What’s the fifth?”
“Hatha yoga. The ability to maintain a waking trance. A place so centered, so uncluttered by thought that my access to the quantum realm of the unconscious remains steady and open.”
“So you don’t have to be in a catatonic or comatose state,” Ethan said nodding. “Good one. Sort of like what an artist does or a CTW, but with more control, the on-and-off switch in your hands instead of fate’s.” He nodded some more as if totally sold on the idea, then of course, he had to sabotage both of them as always. “I mean, better you than me, but I like it. Just keep in mind it’s what every CTW on the planet is trying to do twenty-four seven, get better access to that on-and-off switch so they can stay in the peak performance zone and never have to come out of it. So you’ll be doing something they haven’t managed.”
Convergence_ The Time Weavers Page 26