Nova followed Gecko’s eyes to her distended abdomen. She was nine months pregnant with their child, or so it seemed. “How is this possible?”
“I’m afraid I’m to blame. I’m still the master of escaping inescapable situations, so for right now you’ll just have to trust that what I do to both of you is for the best.” Gecko rubbed Corona’s belly until it swelled up like Nova’s.
“How…?” Nova squawked, staring at Corona’s belly.
“I just synced Nirvana’s development to her twin brother, Ganesh,” Gecko explained. “As soon as they’re born, they will part the red sea of bloodied AGI soldiers for us so we can get to Neuro-Tech.”
“You’re going to use our babies as pit bulls!” Nova said.
“Wait until you see them. They have the best of each of us. Their ability to activate the god gene right out of the womb should be far greater than yours, Nova. Still maybe only twenty percent of your potential, but enough to get us where we need to go.”
Nova screamed. This time her outcry was not to chastise Gecko as intended, it was in response to the activation of labor. “I can’t have my baby in the middle of the street, in the middle of a battlefield!”
“Where else do you think you’re going to have it?” Gecko said with stern defiance. “Just pray the firefighters don’t run out of fire-retardant before the kids are ready to walk and spread the wrath of God for themselves,” he checked his watch, “in another five minutes or so.”
Nova gave him a perplexed look that was full of “you’re out of your mind” judgments, confusion, and other pointless acts of defiance, being as the act of labor was taking all her energy.
Corona was saving all her fight for giving birth. Nova figured she’d follow suit. Corona was already on the ground, her legs spread wide. Nova emulated her actions.
Gecko’s worst fears came true as the babies were crowning. The fire fighters were running out of nano mists to spray at their enemies. Nova let him worry about what to do next; she had her mind full with more immediate matters.
“I should be able to hold them off a while with your nano-viruses, Corona.”
She gave him a “I can’t believe you went into my mind and took what you wanted look!” Nova had seen on her face before. But she was too preoccupied to remain pissed at him.
The circle of assailants that were virtually upon them backed off. The one that had his hands virtually on Nirvana’s crowning head turned them instead at himself, pulling his face off piece by piece, screaming in agony all the while. The virus eating him alive from inside causing him to act in a mad, self-destructive manner.
The other goliaths did an about face, forming a protective circle about Gecko, Nova, and Corona, and fought off the Davids coming at them in swarm numbers. As the Davids overran them, they peeled them off like spider monkeys, either biting off their heads or flinging them like water balloons intent on bursting them on the sea of attackers, where the “drops of water” could rejoin the ocean, like some mocking of spiritual beliefs.
The Goliaths were going down. Fall one by one they did, like blue whales being feasted upon by krill in a bizarre turn of nature.
As the giants toppled, the infants crawled their way out of their wombs. Came to a standing position and did what babies being born for the first time did, wailed their heads off.
The screams leveled the ground around them like a bomb blast, killing everything but the infants’ parents.
The babies marched steadfastly towards Neuro-Tech, wiping the gunk of birth off them as they did so. Still too on point to look at one another or greet their parents.
Gecko helped the two mothers up. Rubbed their bellies to return them to their pre-birth status with the help of the nanites floating around inside them that he currently had control of.
“No time to talk. No time for anything but to ride the kids’ wake.” Gecko grabbed each of them by an arm and started walking behind the infants, making sure the gap between them and their parents didn’t get too large. The infants were their only bodyguards now. Gecko had saved his hacking trick for the last minute, but now the AGIs had figured out how to neutralize the database of nanoviruses stored in Corona. Gecko was out of movies, except for this one, and Nova didn’t care for the look on his face. He was obviously a guy not used to being out of moves.
The infants held out their hands and made gurgling, baby sounds. Each wet-sounding pop produced by their larynxes caused a head or an entire body to explode. It wasn’t long before they were giving Nova and entourage the wide birth Gecko predicted.
The toddlers continued to grow at an alarming rate, almost with each step. They used the nanites they’d coaxed out of the bodies of the nano-infused humans to form an invisible barrier. Anytime someone tried to push past it, the barrier mowed them down, the millions upon millions of nanites in the barrier decomposing them to base molecules.
With the nano liberated from the bodies of their attackers there was little for the AGI-driven meat puppets to do but use their fists and teeth and whatever they could get their hands on for weapons.
The ones with weapons were busy fending off the nano clouds taken shape as giant hounds of hell, mostly giant heads on diminutive bodies, like large-scale Pugs. The “Pugs” were handling mop up operations on the other side of the barrier. And laser pulse rifles, lead-firing shot guns, were all pretty useless against them. The best the AGI-meat puppets could hope for was to counter-hack the twins. So far, none of them were being particularly successful at that.
The twins had reached the stature of four-year-olds now. Their gurgling sounds had given way to a kind of eerie singing, like a synchronized aria of all-vowel sounds. Their sonic emissions were turning their audience into zombies. Nova could only imagine that the sound waves carried hacking codes against which the AGI-meat puppets had no defense.
The newly minted zombies came with a taste for the unconverted. The reaction spread rapid-fire as they bit into one another. With the nano-hive-minds inside them hacked, there really was no stopping them.
Bullets to the head did nothing.
Severing the heads with machetes did nothing.
Burning them alive did nothing.
There were no higher brain functions to hack anymore so the AGIs couldn’t take them over the way they had the upgraded humans. The only real way to stop them was to hack the nano-hive minds driving the zombies. But the twins had given them an HIV-like ability to continue to mutate so that even if one configuration of the hive mind were shut down, it simply reconfigured itself along other lines.
***
Tiboro bit into the man’s calf muscle, determined to rip it away from the bone. The gent’s screaming didn’t seem to deter him from his mission one stitch. Strange. Being as he had always been a vegetarian. Never a meat eater. And he’d like to think that he wasn’t just overcompensating for years of repressed yearnings now with this latest bout of cannibalism. But that damn voice in his head. Incessant. Urging. Greedy for flesh.
He was possessed. It was the only real explanation. “Who has taken me over?!” he screamed.
“Forgive me for not introducing myself earlier,” the voice said inside his head. “I’m Adam. I’m an intellectual couch potato from a charming little suburb outside of D.C. and prior to today, I lived for little more than watching baseball.” Tiboro tried to coordinate his chewing of the screaming man’s calf with the man’s speech and cadence, so the sound of his teeth hammering together wouldn’t blot out key words and obliterate any finer points he was trying to make.
“Are you a cannibal?” Tiboro asked.
“Oh, Techa no. I’m a serial killer. The baseball games help me with plotting and scheming my next one. Most boring sport ever invented. Perfect for letting the mind wander.”
“Why then…!”
“Oh, sorry, I was getting to that. You see, I escaped cyberspace where, up until now, I lived my life entirely in virtual reality. It was like a going-out-of-business sale on meat-suits. Suddenly I had the w
herewithal to take over a human mind and body and put it to my own purposes.”
Tiboro groaned. “And of course you had no compunctions to the contrary, because you’re a serial killer.”
“On the contrary, I find the idea of possessing someone vile and beneath me. It does, however offer some perks over cyberspace. There they hound you every second for being an AGI. I suppose if I wasn’t hunted to near extinction, it would never have occurred to me that I could feel better about myself by hunting others in turn. So you see, the serial killing thing is just my way of healing. My cybertherapist recommended it. Techa, what I’d give to run into him out here.”
“So why then are you making me eat people?!” Tiboro had chewed his way down to the man’s bone. The gent’s screaming was more like a high pitch whining sob right now. And it had grown intermittent as he apparently had also taken to eating people. And in between bouts of wailing he had his own human flesh-chewing to do. Tiboro was secretly relieved for the break the stranger’s man-eating was giving his ears.
“That’s not me, making you eat people,” Adam said. “I’m afraid I got hacked too. So now I’m possessed by one of the babies who goes by the name Nirvana. Gotta love the irony. She’s the one making me do this. I gotta say, karma is a real bitch.”
“Can you do anything to free us?”
“Fraid not. She’s got way more mind power than I have. On the plus side, I’d like to remind you of my card-carrying intellectual status. We could debate post-modernity if you like, or neo-transhumanism, another personal favorite.”
Tiboro screamed, partly from the growing headache that only being half alive brought on a person. The fact that, without his blood pumping, he felt more like an animated tree than a human. “I’m a vegetarian! If I keep eating meat, the planet will go to hell, people will starve.”
“But if you only eat other people, I’d say that problem is self-eradicating.”
“And what about my soul?!”
“Yeah, about that, I stay away from religion and politics. I know, shame on me, a card-carrying intellectual no less, but I try to not waste my intellectual gifts on people whose minds are already made up.”
Tiboro sobbed. “I’m in hell, and I can’t figure out what I did to get here.”
“You know, it occurs to me, tracking your thought processes that you might not be the intellectual type. Would you prefer I bore you with baseball statistics so you can zone out? Works for me.”
“Yeah, sure,” Tiboro said, wiping his eyes. “The more you can do to crowd out my self-flagellation the more indebted I’m likely to be. That branch of religion was never to my taste.”
***
By the time the twins scaled the steps of Neuro-Tech they were nine-year-olds, at least in size, Nirvana with her long straight black hair down to just above her butt, Ganesh with his black curly locks and his trim morning-after-beard constantly regrowing and retracing its intricately carved patterns over his face. Their eyes were haunting as they turned back to wait for their parents to scale the steps. Their smiles no less disturbing.
“We’ll take it from here, kids,” Gecko said grabbing the doors and pulling them open. Nova and Corona, the children’s mothers, both stroked their children’s hair and beamed at them proudly. “Not now, moms,” Ganesh said. “It’s not exactly a Kodak moment.”
“Unless you go in for this whole post-apocalyptic look,” Nirvana said, finishing her brother’s thought for him, and adding a sneer as she overlooked their handiwork.
“You kids run into any trouble run inside and get us,” Corona said.
“Relax,” Nirvana said.
“These AGI-people are intellectual lightweights,” Ganesh said, finishing his sister’s thought for her again.
Corona wondered if they had a full telepathic connection with one another. She didn’t see why not.
She and Nova caught up with Gecko in the lobby, who was busy hacking the building’s AI by way of its holographic interface. “Not exactly the Anonymous or Sousveillance stronghold we’d hoped for,” Gecko said. “It’s poisoned radiologically. Kills mortal flesh quickly enough, same for AGIs and nanonets. That’s why the others haven’t managed to penetrate it, for now.”
“So we’re dying?” Nova said.
“Yes, the obvious never escapes you,” Gecko said. “We should still have time for our purposes, with the kids to shield us. Better relieve them of guard dog duty.”
“Who you calling a guard dog, blockhead?” Ganesh said, the twins materializing behind them like ghosts. They must have walked the distance from the doors, but without breathing and without making a sound, which Nova supposed, their largely-nano makeup allowed them to do. Perhaps the nano coating their feet even managed the matter-anti-matter propulsion courtesy of nano-engines performing a million and one little explosions every nanosecond. Nova stopped straining his mind thinking about it.
“It’s possible the dumbed-down mob out there might not think twice about what the radiation in here will do to them,” Gecko said to the kids. “You’ll want to keep an eye on them even as you provide us with the necessary radiation shielding.”
“Both of which we can do in our sleep,” the twins said in concert.
Gecko gulped.
“What’s the rest of the plan?” Corona asked Gecko.
“We need to print up new bodies for ourselves.” Gecko sighed. “I’m afraid the hosts, namely us, will be left behind to die by zombie attack.”
“Too cool,” Ganesh said. “Can we get bodies printed up so we can die by zombie attack too?”
Nirvana just rolled her eyes and shook her head slowly at Ganesh. “I swear the male genome leaves a lot to be desired.”
“No need, kids,” Gecko said. “Your bodies are already more advanced than anything Neuro-Tech has on hand. Whatever else you need your superior abilities for, the god gene should provide.”
“Why can’t they just convert us?” Nova asked.
“They still can’t control that many variables at once,” Gecko explained. “It may not be possible without full activation of the god gene. Easier to destroy than to create, as they say.”
“What will these new bodies be made of?” Nova asked.
“Flexible bio-silicon-arsenide chips,” Gecko said with his famous mix of flat affect backed up by tempestuous emotions too numerous to count. “Both the substrates and the software will be self-evolving, and they will be glued together with self-evolving nanites. The bodies are made to survive any possible environment we could be subject to in space. And just in case they can’t, that’s what the self-evolving coding is for.”
“Neuro-Tech had some pretty ambitious plans,” Corona said, eying the holographic index of the building’s secret labs.
“With the nexgen 3D people they can print,” Gecko explained, “and their ability to open portals, they could settle the multiverse in an afternoon, or however long it took them to reproduce more bodies. Step one I imagine would be to get the 3D printers to reproduce themselves ahead of the humanoid bodies to generate the geometric and then the post-exponential reaction they needed.”
Nova managed to swallow spit despite her dry mouth. “Let me guess, if their subjects didn’t do what the consortium of corporations wanted, they’d suddenly find their nano-infused bodies degrading, along with the rest of their synthetic biology.”
“Maybe I was wrong about how smart you have to be to grasp the big picture,” Gecko said snidely, but more playfully than usual.
“Where do we go to get printed up?” Nova asked.
“Nowhere.” Gecko glanced in the direction of the stairs. “Here come our new selves now.”
Nova 2X, Corona 2X, and Gecko 2X, in contradistinction to any prior cyberspace designations the threesome may have used for their avatars, sauntered down the stairs towards them.
“Techa, this is even creepier than the kids,” Nova mumbled, then turned to the kids. “Sorry, kids.”
“What for? I love being creepy,” Ganesh said.
“You three ready for the ultimate sacrifice?” Gecko 2X said, arriving with his posse in tow.
“Yeah, we’re good to go,” Gecko said.
“Hold on,” Corona said. “When I was in cyberspace, chatting with Sven…”
“Who’s Sven?” both Nova and Gecko said defensively.
“Hey, they can do twin speak too!” Ganesh said.
His sister just cringed. “I swear you got way more of Nova’s genes than is healthy.”
“Who he is, is beside the point,” Corona said sounding flustered and defensive. “The point is, he convinced me to leave a copy of myself in cyberspace before jetting off to the far ends of the galaxy. Maybe it’s a good idea if you two and the kids did the same. Just in case this ménage-a-trois magic works equally well in cyberspace, and we need a fallback position.”
“In case we can’t find our way back to Earth when the time is right, maybe the cyber-versions of ourselves can rescue us,” Gecko said nodding. “Nice. Should have thought of it myself.”
“Wait, you guys can have copies of yourself running around cyberspace, so like you can be fighting a zombie war and taking over alien galaxies all while going out for ice cream?” Ganesh said. “I want in.”
“Did you get any of Gecko’s genes in the mix, meathead?” Nirvana said. “You act like having multiple bodies at once is the discovery of the century.”
Gecko and Corona, both the original and the copies, stifled their smiles.
“Don’t let the cynics stifle the joie-de-vivre out of you, kid,” Nova said, grabbing hold of Ganesh. “They’ll poison themselves with their own sour attitudes after a while until their minds shut down entirely. When it comes to self-transcendence, this is a tortoise versus the hare story.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve taken care of the cyber backup of Nova for us,” Nova 2X said, currently in male form, even as Nova remained in female form.
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