She took a brief moment to reflect on the fact that Aniruddh translated to “Boundless” in English. Was that the Nano Man’s way of thinking of his own intellect? Or the “gift” he was determined to give the common man?
One of Corona’s meat-suit puppets was working on the guard in the elevator. He was big enough not to leave her much room to work in. That meant Jujitsu was winning out over roundhouse kicks. She looked like she might just make it to the penthouse. But the elevator was too much of a bottleneck in the pipeline. Corona’s agents were already drilling their way through the roof of the floor below, making more conduits for themselves.
Simultaneously, the yoga class going on on the roof of the neighboring building had been coopted for faster entry into Otto’s penthouse. The students had arrived by private plane, whether Uber-rented or privately owned, and so had them at the ready. Corona sent them and their delivery mechanisms bursting through Otto’s glass walls overlooking the city, meant to provide panoramic views. Today they were providing instead generous entry to Corona’s private army.
Corona busied herself with hacking the smart windows of Otto’s penthouse and the planes to make sure both had “the right stuff” she needed for her plan to work. Otherwise the windows would have been unassailable, and her agents would have smashed against the glass like bugs on a windshield.
Corona’s meat-suit avatars crawled out of their crashed planes like eggs hatching a new kind of vicious, cold blooded, predatory reptile never before seen on earth. The hatchlings determined to eat “daddy.” And for beaks and talons they had guns, lasers, ninja weapons, and whatever was lying around his apartment.
The Nano Man merely smiled. Never missed a beat. Never seemed anything other than a pairing of calm and curious. Without cuing, he picked the one meat puppet out of the throng standing before him into which Corona had downloaded her own consciousness. “Corona, really? It’s not you I’m even after. And all I want for Nova is to bring out the god in him. It’s what I want for us all.”
“It’s a great idea, Otto. But your timing is off. Look at where we are. Look at what you are. The monster you’ve become.”
Her sidekicks fired their guns and lasers at him from all directions. It didn’t occur to them that they didn’t just have him in a crossfire, they had themselves. The bullets and lasers went through the Nano Man and ended up in their fellow assailers. The ones wielding the scythe and the scimitar did so with such ferocity that they could not stop the blades from sliding through one another when they also slid through the Nano Man, although in his case, to no effect. It hadn’t occurred to Corona’s agents yet why the weapons were simply lying about the apartment in the first place. They were either testaments to earlier failed suicides or a testament to his own imperviousness.
The next woman went at him with a howl and a ninja kick to the knee. She lost her leg up to the thigh. As badly as Corona felt for her, she had to admit her relentless screaming was getting in the way of Corona’s next point. The hemorrhaging femoral artery silenced her quickly enough.
“You want to be you, only more powerful still?” Corona said.
One of her sidekicks, noting the ineffectiveness of the other approaches, got back in her small one-passenger plane and flew it into him. The sound was no different to the one a bug zapper made as an insect flew into it. Another enterprising former yoga practitioner pulled an electrical feed line out of the wall and drove the live end into him. Corona was more hopeful this time the gesture would be more than useless. The Nano Man just cycled the extra current back to his latest attacker with a touch of his hand until she was so charred she exploded into dust in a mock parody of the Nano Man.
Corona sighed. “Techa give me strength. And the Deep Mind humans? Who get the Runner Up Prize after you for self-transcendence. I just hacked one of two twins, living underground in Australia, afraid of their own shadow. Why don’t you focus your genius as Anonymous is doing on working to make people more enlightened first? Let them decide if and when they’re willing to unravel the god gene, from that more enlightened perspective in the future.”
The Nano Man smiled at her the whole time, as if proud of her, as if staring into the eyes of his own daughter. “I was right about you three. You’re the genesis reaction I need to unlock the potential of the god gene. You’re right, all those other sources, they’re woefully inadequate.”
“Us three? We’re even more broken than most.”
The Nano Man reprised his smile. “Yes, but broken in just the right way. You, well, you’re everything the Deep Mind types are supposed to be but aren’t quite. Because their approach is too logical, too methodical. Lacking in the spiritedness, the spontaneity of lazy genius like yourself, who won’t take the time to be so cautious about anything. Despite a childhood that causes her to put safety first. Curious, no? Almost as if a part of your mind understands that the best protection is flow state, something that artists understand so well, but Deep Mind thinkers still struggle with.”
Speaking of addressing the problem at hand from flow state, two of her ninja goddesses had fled the scene after witnessing the failure of the electrical cord stunt. Gotten into their planes and buzzed off. She thought they’d merely surrendered to the inevitable. Apparently not. The first of them had returned with a harrier jet. She was currently preoccupied with firing a missile up their ass big enough to prune the penthouse from its penultimate point, just short of the pinnacle statue, on the building. The missile would take Corona out as well. She sighed. Sometimes this whole working for the greater good thing was a real pain in the ass.
The Nano Man grew wings to absorb the blast and to shield Corona from it, focus the concussion wave back at the jet, knocking it out of the air.
“And your friend, Gecko,” the Nano Man continued. “He’s a complete mess, isn’t he? Subjected to sustained torture and child abuse that went on for most of his life. Stuck in an inescapable prison, until he could find a way out, however impossible. And now, he lives only to free others so no one ever has to experience what he experienced. More of the right stuff, coming out of all the wrong backstories.”
The last of the ninjas that had fled earlier by plane was back. This time in a dirigible. Corona wondered what she planned to do with it. Pull a Hindenburg? Corona should have paid more attention to the satellite dishes on top of it aimed at the sky. Apparently the pilot was retargeting a military grade satellite. She had put herself in the path of the microwave beam if only to run interference with any counterhack the Nano Man might care to run. The microwave disintegrated her and turned the Nano Man red briefly. But beyond the color therapy, which Corona found strangely calming, had no other effect. He redirected the wave and took out the satellite firing on him with it.
“And Nova, the most busted of all of you,” the Nano Man continued. “So happy in the here and now, so fearful of the future, he’s turned the present moment into a grave, and buried himself alive by heaping all of time on top of himself. And yet by being here in the now, he’s freer than any transhuman alive. He’s the one thing about humanity that the transhumanists should have had the sense to hold on to.
“No, no, no, separated you remain busted. But together, you’re the way forward for the transhuman race.”
“Says the man who is possibly the one person on the planet more busted than we are. How could you possibly feel your thinking is worth much?”
The Nano Man sighed. “You can keep coming after me if you like, but by now you see it’s pointless. And all that wasted mind power could be used to set your friends free. Go ahead and see if you can keep each other alive without activating the god gene, or by only partially unfolding it. But one way or another, I’m coming for you. Maybe your friend Gecko can help you find some other way out of the maze.”
“They’ll do just fine on their own until I can figure out how to put you down.”
“I don’t think so. By robbing me of my off-grid status, you’ve sicced Level 9 on both of us. The ubermind sees us both
as a threat to the greater good. You know what that means? She will gather her resources, start retreating from her other concerns and devote herself to bringing us all down, full-time. She will never stop. No more breathers between rounds like a good boxing match. Oh, don’t worry about me. I’ll make out just fine. You and your friends, however…” The Nano Man laughed. “Techa help you without that god gene by your side.”
Corona could feel her resolve vacillating. She should have thought out her move on the chessboard better before moving her knight into position. She was about to be mated by the queen.
“Go, go be with your friends. It’s game over. Wallow in your dark night of the soul, until she comes for you. Or pick yourselves up and become the gods I know you to be.”
The female agents that had never stopped trying to get at him the entire time they were talking dropped like flies. The ones that weren’t dead already. Because Corona was gone. On her way to her friends.
She left just one meat suit avatar standing. Who gazed at the human fallout on Corona’s behalf before shifting her attention back to the Nano Man. Speaking through the avatar, Corona said, “You’ll give these people I borrowed back their lives. You’ll do it because carrying the guilt otherwise will just compromise my ability to survive, and, by your logic, Nova’s. And by doing so, you will mitigate the Level 9 reprisal I’ve brought down on you.”
Nano Man nodded placatingly as the last meat suit collapsed.
EIGHTEEN
Corona ripped through the walls of the garbage truck Gecko had so unceremoniously disposed of her body in. They would have to have a talk about that when the moment was right. Her nano really wasn’t rated for these kinds of antics, but she’d picked up a few things from the nano-virus-riddled meat suit she inhabited in Beijing. Suddenly, hacking her own body was a lot easier, as was getting the nano clouds swarming inside her to both proliferate and differentiate. Insights that she owed even more to Pashdo, who perhaps continued to see farther into her future than she did.
The boys hugged her so tightly she thought it would trigger another near-death experience. “You’re back. Everything is going to be fine now,” Nova said.
Gecko and Corona just shook their heads slowly. “Ignorance isn’t bliss, moron, it’s death,” Gecko said.
“Forgive me if I don’t find you the most objective source of the truth.”
“I’m afraid he’s right,” Corona said. “Had a little run in with the Nano Man.”
“Who?” Nova asked. But Gecko’s eyes were already going wide. He’d hacked her mind and received the full download in less time than it would take for her to give Nova the abridged version.
“Forget the Nano Man,” Gecko said. “He was the catalyst for the inevitable, no more. Right now we have bigger problems. Surviving a Level 9 attack.”
“Um, did you say Level 9?” Nova asked.
“To clarify for you what that means,” Gecko said. “It means no more breathers. She will come at us until we’re done for. And she will do it not just with a piece of her mind, but with all of it. She’s shutting down all other operations, putting them in autonomous mode, just so she can deal with us.”
Nova gulped. “So it’s activate the god gene or die.”
“As usual, it’s the dullard in the group who gets to the most seminal point first.”
“Well, the good news is, misery loves company, right?!” Nova said, trying to brighten the mood.
Gecko roared. “Techa help me if I don’t kill you before Level 9 gets the chance.”
***
“Techa, could this place be any more depressing?” Gecko said, taking in Nova’s and Corona’s hovel.
“You’re looking at it without the overlays?” Nova could tell from his face that he was. “Yeah, that is a bit intense.” In the spirit of the occasion, and not wanting anything to come between him and his friends in his final hours, Nova dropped the pretense, stripping the overlays. His contacts reading his mind’s intent by whatever communications channel they’d set up for themselves.
The interlocking domes—at least there were more than one—were nothing but 3D printed cement half-spheres, the ridges of the printing process providing the only contour. No windows. The same cement provided flooring throughout the dwelling. The primary living dome connected to smaller domes in a starfish pattern that was quite lovely if you happened to be flying over this part of the city and for some reason also didn’t have your overlays on. They could have chosen to have windows in all the domes, but honestly, it was like looking out at the other cells in a bee colony; what was the point?
As UBI figures had climbed annually for some time now, most everyone had moved on to better digs, leaving their compound with thousands of such living units mostly as a playground for kids. A good chunk of the real estate in fact had become a kibbutz run and operated entirely by the children. They had managed to turn it into enough of a hobbit-land that it made Nova yearn for windows. The ubermind kept an eye on the kibbutz, “parenting” largely by downloading superego-like dictates to their minds that prompted good mental hygiene. Think glass-half-full-thoughts kind of thing, and always follow your dreams. The ubermind even helped them identify professions they would excel at and steered them developmentally along the right tracks to achieve their goals, providing all the support needed to turn the most recalcitrant of children into tomorrow’s superstars. Most kids had multiple parents; some had dozens who’d donated DNA towards their genome as part of their civic duty, which didn’t extend any further in their minds. The more parents they had, the less anyone cared to be involved. This wasn’t a universal truth, just a widespread enough of one to lead to many communities like this across the globe.
Nova migrated his attention from worrying about the children to worrying about their own fate. From the way Corona was dragging herself around the dome, moving in slow motion, as if sleep-deprived, depressed, and self-pitying all at the same time, attending to the herb tea, she had her overlays down too. It was a game a lot of people played. Buy packets of soil with billions of unexplored one-of-a-kind designer synthetic bacteria bred to procure superfoods, see what they did to the herbs you grew in the soil, which you then smoked, cooked with, or brewed into tea. The idea was to try and get past the nano-infused neural nets enough to get good and stoned, or perhaps discover some altered state of consciousness worth locking in by designing nano to lock it in. The pioneering spirit for hacking one’s own genome thus was never left entirely to shopping on the mindnet for other people’s breakthroughs, or even designing your own. Chance discoveries were as important today as ever. Nova doubted she was brewing anything that would lift their spirits or help them find a solution to their shared problem.
He tried to buoy the spirits of the other two on his own; it seemed to be his role in this ménage-a-trois. “Hey! You promised to take Corona and I on a haunted house tour of the mind to make sure we were ready for what’s coming next.”
“Don’t be so eager for it!” Gecko blurted at the top of his lungs, losing his composure. “They were just sadistic exercises I justified after the fact by making you think I was your liberator. I swear you can be so dense sometimes.”
“But Corona…”
“Went along with them as some extinction exercise, the way they train agoraphobics to get used to wide open spaces again, a little bit at a time. She never gave up on me finding my humanity. Maybe if she had a little more time…”
Corona ignored the two of them like a pair of grousey parakeets who had been mated together and living in the same cage for far too long. She just pulled up a chair for herself, folded up her legs, wrapped her arms around them, like a pill bug curling up, and sipped her tea.
When Nova felt down on himself, Gecko must have felt responsible, because the next thing Nova knew, Gecko was lifting him off the ground and play wrestling with him on the ground like some kid. “Stop it!” he shouted repeatedly. “I’m not some kid!” But Gecko’s tickling had him laughing anyway, and soon the “Stop it
!” squawks had an entirely different tone. He’d pinned Nova to the floor by this point and there was no getting up if he wanted to. When he stopped the tickling, and let Nova settle down, he said, “This is all you need to know to survive level 9. To treat whatever’s happening to you, however much you hate it, as a game. Get some distance on it so you can have fun with it.” He pinned Nova’s hands to the ground and rocked his butt back and forth over Nova’s crotch to emphasize his point.
“That’s what you taught me the night we gambled in Retro-Roboville,” Gecko said. “You get lost in what you’re doing, forget your fears about the future, about Big Brother in the form of the ubermind or the Nano Man. Love overcomes fear. Maybe it’s still only ninety percent love versus ten percent fear in those moments. And maybe to activate the god gene you need one hundred percent love and zero fear.”
Gecko rolled off him and stared at the ceiling, perhaps using the symmetrical ridges to steady his mind the way Nova was. Letting the ensuing silence sober him, and the meditation focused at the ceiling clear his mind, Nova said, “You forget we humans are even less in control of our minds than you transhumans. Even if what you were saying were true…”
“It’s called flow state,” Corona said, speaking up finally. “I get into it when I hack into people’s minds, or into the ubermind. I get into it when I’m fighting ninja-warrior-style like a game of Commando. You just have to find what it is in you that triggers the flow state and run with it.”
The God Gene Page 18