He stretched his lips in a straight line. It was the smile of a snake. “Well, then, I suppose all that’s left to do is shake on it.”
Corona smiled and took his hand. He was old school to the end. They both knew this entire conversation was captured verbatim by their neural nets and backed up to a secure place in the cloud for mutual blackmail if it came to that. “One last thing, Felix. I have to come into your mind, see what thoughts you’re hiding from me.”
“I’m sure whatever paranoid fears I have of things going awry, you’ve had far more time to think about than I have, since you’re the one that put the idea for this project in my head.”
“True, but the mind-meld serves other purposes. The better I know you the better I can be assured of your ability to undertake the project you’ve been presented with.”
He smiled stiffly and straightened up in his chair. Any sense of a relaxed posture was gone. “Of course.” He tried to unknot his body in preparation for the meld, but just grew tenser in the process. He clearly didn’t fancy this part of signing government contracts.
Corona took his hands gently to soothe him, and stroked them reassuringly. She was also sending nanites into his body to get him to relax further so he wouldn’t shift his weight in his chair and end up shattering his spine in the process. Or pulling any number of muscles. He was that stiff. Meanwhile, she started the mind-meld, hacking her way past his defenses.
***
Corona was curious about the conversation going on with Gecko in the other region of her brain. The nanites had shut her off from it to help her stay in character with Felix better. When the exchange with Felix was over, the two regions of the brain would merge once again. Perhaps the nanites handled all the processing of the conversation with Gecko over in her left-hemisphere while the exchange with Felix was happening in her right brain. It begged the question of how she could have so much real estate to run both personalities in what was akin to dissociative disorder in tandem rather than in sequence. But her nanites would long ago have given her the added mental real estate she needed by activating previously pruned neural webs, age-reversing her brain in essence to that place in early childhood before neural webs started getting pruned off for lack of stimulation and usage.
For all she knew, her brain was now crowded with even more neural webs than an infant’s, all more active, and up to who knew what? One day she’d have to probe her own mind better, the way those Crispy Critters—the CRISPR-mind-enhanced—did. Even she had to marvel at their self-hacking abilities that were so inbred. For all their shapeshifting and adaptability, however, they seemed rudderless, without overriding aim or purpose. Merely living life like a bit of theater improv. Still, combine her sense of purpose, with the upgrades that would be coming their way soon enough if Mr. Felix Ungerman was successful at fulfilling his assignment… Focus, Corona. You’re supposed to be hacking Felix’s mind, not yours.
Felix was running down a corridor to get away from her. He kept looking back over his shoulder, a sense of panic in his eyes, his face tense from exertion. The growing sweat on his brow dripping into his eyes and nearly blinding him from the saltiness. He kept wiping his eyes with the backs of his hands when his eyelids weren’t enough to keep the rain from his own being off them. What was he so scared of? Corona kept after him, taking every turn he did in the labyrinth of halls. Finally, she stopped chasing him. And just started opening doors at random. Behind each one was some tableau of happiness. A family’s laughter as they gathered around the dinner table to share their day. A team of scientists congratulating themselves on some protein molecule they’d manufactured. Tourists anxious to get on the space elevator for the first time. Spirited gamblers interrupting their drinking to stare out the space port of the space hotel at earth. So this was what Felix was so terrified of. That their project might actually succeed. He needed his anxiety, his fears, his hobgoblins. She should have guessed as much from how he presented in his suit, his stiff body language despite his determination to look at ease in the role of salesman. He didn’t want to be the last man standing, cowering in the darkness, not knowing why he couldn’t come into the light. So long as there were others, there was more cover for him.
Corona had to get to the source of his nervousness, his refusal to heal. Because it could well sabotage their project. She subdivided herself over and over again so Felix had no corridor to run down without running into her. “What is it, Felix? Tell me. What truth are you running from?” He tried running through her when he couldn’t run away from her. He bounced off her and fell to the ground. Got up again and charged with renewed gusto, screaming all the while in a mad rage. “Let me go! Let me go! You can’t trap me here. It’s inhuman.”
Finally, he backed off, stood halfway between the two Corona’s blocking both paths down the hall. And there he stomped and threw his hands about and screamed to high heaven. The screaming turned to sobbing and then he curled up in a ball on the floor. He was a lot younger now than the Felix that was seated opposite her inside the cubicle in Building 41. Early twenties, she’d say. He twitched like a penguin in his black suit with his white shirt, a penguin undergoing electroshock, or perhaps just recovering from it. It was just a visual metaphor. She brushed past it, going further into his mind in search of the memory that was the trigger for all this.
She found the cluster of embarrassing moments in his life. She realized the memories were just the real shield, like a blister that had grown over the one overriding hurt he couldn’t let go of. After she peeled them back, she found what she was looking for. Felix as mail boy for some corporation, looking with lusting eyes at all the important people, all with mind upgrades, all busy reinventing their corner of the world. He had been raised as a Jesuit. They didn’t believe in human upgrade tech.
Instead he’d been classically trained to debate the ins and outs of Plato’s dialogues, in the Socratic method. He’d been sent out into the real world convinced he was smart enough to go the distance with the best of them. He did in fact win most of the arguments he’d interjected himself in. The scientists all found his philosophical debates to be an amusing pastime. They enjoyed having him around. Sort of like a team mascot. Or worse, like a court jester. But they saw him as handicapped. He couldn’t create tangible things to ease human suffering. He could just take them away from their unsolved problems for a while. Provide a brief respite, like some entertainer. The most he could hope for was that in greasing the wheels of their minds he might reenergize them enough to get past the sticking point that was holding up their achieving their goals. He’d resigned himself to his reduced fate in life.
Then someone came along and invented a philosophical mindset as a plug-in. Suddenly anyone who wanted to get lost in Socratic debates in their heads or with others could as a form of pastime. As a way to relax the mind while also energizing it to propel more scientific breakthroughs.
And then Felix was right back to being less than nothing.
Finally, he had no choice but to go against his religious upbringing. He could have collected his Universal Basic Income and been done with it. But he didn’t want UBI to be an excuse to remain on the sidelines of life forever, watching the great game of life like some spectacle with no say in its outcome. He had to effect the outcome of the game in some small way. So he agreed to have a neural net installed. Even so, he hated the thing so much he could never make the most of it. You can’t be a creator when you’re fighting yourself at every turn, investing more in self-destruction than in self-creation.
So he’d settled for this salesman job, smart enough now to traffic in hi-tech wares, pawn them off on people who might make more use of them. His self-esteem had just fallen further in the process. If it weren’t enough of a sin that he’d sold his soul for thirty pieces of silver, now he was selling the souls of others downriver. There was no room in hell torturous enough for him.
My Techa, Corona. What have you gotten yourself into? This is the last guy on earth you should be partne
ring with. He’ll do anything possible to sabotage your project. Or… possibly, just the opposite. He’ll work harder than anyone to make it happen as his ultimate redemption, as his chance to abandon his old god in favor of a new one, one that he ushered into being, that would persecute everyone else finally and leave him alone, or liberate them. Either way, he would finally get a chance to turn the tables on those who had forever scarred his mind with his Jesuit training. And so she continued to insinuate these thoughts into his mind until he owned them. Starting with the seeds she’d planted earlier. She didn’t have to do nearly as much mental reconstruction work as she’d initially imagined. In fact, he did most of it for her.
What seemed like hours later but had in fact been mere minutes owing to the time-warping effects of the nanite-assisted mind-meld, she severed the link to his mind. He actually smiled back at her. “That didn’t go nearly as badly as I anticipated. In fact I feel rather energized and eager to get going with our little project.”
“A pleasure doing business with you, Felix,” Corona said, smiling at him.
He scooted back the chair, bowed formerly at her, folded up his laptop and strolled out of the room with it.
In a world overrun with tech breakthroughs, everyone was looking for that one that would truly stand out, that would change everything. Had she landed on a real game changer? Surely she had. Felix Ungerman might be a midget in his own mind, but to her, he was the savior of the free world. And she’d released him on humanity like God sending his first born to help mankind atone for his sins. Okay, one too many religious analogies, Corona, for a devout atheist.
Now, back to more immediate and pressing problems. Keeping Nova alive. Let’s hope Gecko found something, she thought, merging with the other half of her mind and catching up on the conversation she’d had with him a short while earlier.
SEVEN
Gecko and Corona were walking the halls of the aquarium, surrounded by a curving glass wall that melded seamlessly with a glass ceiling. Metal-glass of course to be able to take those kinds of pressures. The hammerhead sharks, the manta rays and the giant squids were putting on the standout performances. The former lovers figured they could talk pretty freely, being as most everyone else had their headsets on, their virtual reality gear augmenting what their senses could relay to them. For others, their contacts or their mindchips or their neural nets would be giving them an even more immersive experience with the shark tank, and distracting them all the more completely. The gasps and “Oohs!” and “Ahs!” and general din gave them cover from the unoccupied ears and eyes.
“So what did you find?” Corona said.
“Think about it. We can pretty much narrow our search to the corporations specializing in Intelligence Augmentation. Other than the IA firms, everyone else is too busy using their existing upgrades to build a better world for us with the existing smarts they have. I.e. constructing better lawnmower or vacuum cleaner bots. Or better yet, genetically altered grass that doesn’t need mowing and carpets that don’t need vacuuming because the nanites eat the droppings to do their work and to self-replicate. These other firms, what’s more, can hardly afford to risk renovating their own minds with untested software and hardware if it could compromise their livelihoods; let’s not speak of their lives.”
“Leaving out the Crispy Critters you mean?”
“Their genetically modified minds that allow them to hack their own genomes comes with a reset button, being as most genetic modifications will not make them smarter, or for that matter turn them into anything they want to be for particularly long. It’s a lot of trial and error, whether you’re conducting the research on yourself or someone else. In short, if you don’t have a marketable product ready to go, chances are, even a Crispy Critter isn’t much interested. Their time is better spent shape-shifting into one of the forms they’ve already stored in their memory banks than buying your gene makeover. And the odds of one of them spearheading a gene-enhancement breakthrough to get this worked up about, are slim to none.”
“Fine. So what IA firms are we looking at?”
“You might want to be sitting down for this.” Gecko led them into the restaurant attached to the aquarium, which was serving mostly seafood. Today, however, Corona couldn’t be bothered with the irony. She took her seat at the empty table opposite him. Looked at the digital menu that was part of the table-monitor display. Touched one item. When it popped up to give her a holovision look at itself, complete with smells, she smiled approvingly, and said, “I’ll take this one.” The quad copter drone was arriving with her order before the hologram could finish sinking back into the table. Gecko had undergone the same indoctrination at his end of the table, and his lobster was arriving just as her stuffed sea bass, served whole, was arriving. Requiring her to “gut” the fish to expose the delicious insides of duck, and chicken, and a few other things.
“You were saying?” she said, refusing to look up from her food and her zealous eating.
“You’re supposed to look at a person when you make polite conversation.”
“Why, so you can hypnotize me with your devilish good looks into sleeping with you? Been there, done that. Keep it up and I’ll paint the pope’s façade over you and program the rest of the overlay into making you sound and smell like him as well.”
He smiled. “Weak. So very weak.”
She smiled despite herself. With his black curly hair and his trimmed beard, about three days growth old, he reminded her of the Cat Stevens close up on the back of one of his albums. Was it Teaser and the Firecat or Tea for The Tillerman? She couldn’t quite remember and refused to engage her neural net to find out. Sometimes life just played better without all the High-Def. All except for Gecko’s face, of course. She was just punishing herself by not dumbing down her eyes to 20-60, but she couldn’t help herself.
She was choking on the fish, so she washed it down with the wine. They hadn’t ordered wine, but all she had to do was hold her hand out and think about what she wanted. The droid rolling up to the table was quite capable of reading her mind and poured her the selection she wanted from its ambulatory mini-wet-bar. She sighed relief at the clearing of her throat and the perfect pairing of the Pinot Noir with the sea bass. Corona did her best to ride out the explosion of flavors in her mouth and aromas hitting her nose. The tangy cranberry and orange rind flavors of the Pinot Noir wrapped themselves around powerful acidity and a silky body, finishing with notes of earth and cardamom. As to the sea bass… its texture was like that of shark but with nowhere near the sting of the ammonia taste to it.
“Neuro-Tech,” Gecko said, deftly talking and chewing at the same time without anything showing stuck in between his front teeth—always the smooth operator—“is suspect numero uno, I would say.”
“Why?”
“They push items to market faster than anyone else. So they’re cutting corners somewhere. If anybody is going to have a higher percentage of failures to cover up it’s them. In fact, it’s my guess they’re using the early adopters as human guinea pigs to perfect their prototypes. They learn what tweaks they need to apply from the ones whose minds they damage mildly or damage beyond repair, and then they disappear those folks before they can sue and damage the brand name even more than their bottom line. Hell of a business plan, really. It’s what I’d do, moreover.
“Can’t afford to be too cautious in this day and age. Anyone but the one who’s first to market with a particular prototype is never going to catch up. The longer the first prototype is in circulation, the more time the end users have to tweak it, upgrade it, and feed that intel back to the manufacturer, one way or another. It’s not long before they’re miles ahead of the competition.”
“Please tell me you’ve narrowed the search beyond that.”
“Of course. But I have to sync up the suspense of saving your boyfriend with the suspense over what we’re having for desert.”
She surrendered her plate to the robo waiter on cue. Most of her food still on the
plate. “Give the remainder to the homeless outside, please.”
“The homeless are supplied with belt synthesizers, ma’am, that procure food pellets with any taste and texture they want. I’m speaking about the nomads, of course, the ones who refuse the UBI supplied homes, incomes, and in-house food synthesizers capable of spitting out entire meals indistinguishable from the ones you’re eating here.” When the droid saw the look she was giving him, it said, “Of course, I can reformulate the hydrocarbons into unique, one-of-a-kind candies for them and their children that their belt synthesizers aren’t allowed to procure.” It cleared its synthetic throat, “Um, for health reasons.” She smiled more politely to cue it that she was amenable to that solution. And the droid waiter made off with both their plates.
Corona and Gecko repeated the ritual of earlier with the table-monitor, and within seconds their deserts were being whisked to them by a couple drone quad copters. Chocolate cake in her case. Orange sherbert ice cream in his. “You know, these would taste much better together?” Gecko said.
“Of course they would,” she said scornfully, but surrendering to his coquettishness because it wasn’t worth derailing him from whatever next point he was going to make.
After they spooned the mixed treats into one another’s mouths, he gave her a second to yield to the explosion of flavors in her mouth. The chef had gone with a black cocoa for the cake, with its very dark color and intense flavor, magnitudes above even double Dutch chocolate. Yum. As for the orange sherbert, he’d used real oranges; she could taste the difference. Finally Gecko said, “At least you didn’t go in for one of those GI-tract makeovers so you never have to eat again.”
“Techa forbid. Stop stalling.”
The God Gene Page 6