Her people weren’t particularly impressed by the warning. They had the screaming of the gale winds and the roar of the waves splashing against the ship and the creaking metal of containers beginning to slide more and more, and other audible elements of the storm to contend with. Finally, using a combination of hand gestures and a voice going hoarse and the fact that her people were used to keeping a close eye on her, she got everyone into double-time mode, heading over the side.
To free up her martial artists enough to abandon ship, she had to take up their cause. Her fighting style was a bit different. She scooped lightning out of the sky with her left hand extended as she shot it out her right hand at her attackers. Either blasting them over the side of the ship or turning them to ash where they stood, or merely a flambéed version of their former selves, burning and screaming despite all the rain and the ocean’s effort to put out the fire with splashing waves.
Finally, all her people were off, including the latest crop of refugees. With any luck those Haitians would make up for their disappointing martial arts skills with some serious voodoo magic. Anything that put the fear of God into a container ship’s crew that she needed to submit to her when martial arts weren’t enough would be deemed a plus.
She was headed for the railing when the future caught up with her.
The storm found yet another gear, ratcheting up further. The shift in intensity heralded at first with a deafening crack, followed by dead silence. It was the quiet aftermath of being temporarily deafened. Her entire body was locking up from lactic acid build up, a consequence of using it primarily as a shock absorber to compensate for the tossing ship. Her mobility problems couldn’t have come at a worse time.
She lost her footing and went sliding into the closing jaws of the moving containers. With no time to spare, she climbed them like a spider monkey using the magnets in her fingers and the cat-like reflexes of her boosted nervous system. For now, at least, overriding her pushed-past-exhaustion muscles with her backup nervous system.
Elsa made it to the top of the steel crate to see another one from above toppling towards her. She jumped out of the way just in time with the help of her electricity-boosted strength, coming more from the CRISPR gene tweaks this time than the electrical backup grid of her nervous system. The new metabolic pathways must have been kicking in, triggered by the lactic acid buildup to run her cells in an oxygen-deprived environment. But once on her new perch, she couldn’t find solid footing. It was a game of pinball, with her as the pinball and the sliding containers the pinball paddles.
There was no way to anticipate how to dodge all the crates coming at her from all different directions, and at varying velocities. Forget trying to think past their squealing metallic noises, like trying to function coherently with a building’s fire alarm going off. But she kept dancing on her moving dancefloor like one of those Cirque Du Soleil stages that refused to stay even with the ground. There was only one explanation for why she’d lasted this long. The lightning bolt to the forehead. The third eye was still open enough for her to anticipate where to move next, ahead of nervous system spinal cord reflexes, ahead of any mind’s ability to calculate, even with a mindchip enhancement. Though it was a note to self to update its software at the first opportunity.
Elsa jumped off the highest level of the moving containers, caught up in some shell game in the hands of some invisible giant determined to fool the eye of the beholder. Landed on the ship’s railing. Did gymnastics along it like an Olympian on a balance beam, though motivated less by a flair for theatrics and more for dodging the latest containers to come flying over the side.
Finally one of the containers caught her. A momentary lapse in concentration. A split second. That’s all it took. The metal-siding smacked her in the face but good. It was nearly another one way ticket to la-la land. The pain radiated from her cheek throughout her upper body like an explosion in slow motion. She had precious little time to jump from the container’s surface to the side of the container ship. With nothing but magnetic attraction to hold her to either surface. Thank God the container was tumbling or she’d be facing away from the ship with no way to jump perches.
Once against the side of the ship, she held her breath as the tanker-sized vessel took her under. She wanted to jump clear and swim toward the pirate ship, but in these waves?
She gasped as the side of the container ship breached again. The next sound was not placating.
She heard the cargo ship cracking the rest of the way down the middle. She felt the upsurge of the seesaw, this time from the middle of the ship, taking her high, high into the sky. A strange sense of euphoria accompanied her on the way up, like being on one of those fair rides.
Fuck it. She’d always wanted to be an Olympic platform diver. This was her chance to break some records. She took the plunge.
Halfway to the surface, whose waves would have surely smashed her against the ship and cracked her skull like an egg shell, she felt herself snatched out of thin air.
It was the AI-enabled crane on the deck of the pirate ship. A hip-hip hooray for those self-evolving algorithms.
The cranebot set her down on the deck gently as she coughed the rest of the water out of her lungs. Her intensified shivering threatened to chip her enamel amid all the teeth-rattling.
With the help of a couple Chinese minions, she came to standing and laughed for joy at escaping the hands of fate. Together they watched what remained of both halves of the container ship sinking into the bottomless ocean.
There had been just one small miscalculation.
In her defense, she was no master strategist. More the fools-rush-in type. There was no dare she wouldn’t take on impulse and whimsy alone. Life, after all, was meant to be a grand adventure. Why spoil the fun with pre-planning and rehearsal so when the fateful day came it robbed the moment of all its excitement, felt like little more than a rerun on the oldies channel?
Note to self: Consider getting over yourself!
The whirlpools created by the sinking halves of the container ship were taking down both pirate vessels, now separated, the line connecting them snapped by the heaving ocean some time back.
On the plus side, she could direct her wristbands to stop her heart with an electric pulse and to bring her back to life with the same strategy, when the time was right. And the water was hypothermia cold, which would also help preserve her. And the Oregon shoreline was a mere thirty-five miles off. Tidal currents notwithstanding, she may well live to tell the tale. Maybe it was just as well she didn’t have the mindchip with the mathematical software upgrades which would be happy to calculate her odds for her with such a mad scheme.
Also on the plus side: maybe she was riding herself too hard about not planning for the future. When push came to paddle her butt, she seemed to have everything it took. She wished she could say the same for the refugees.
THREE
“Whoa!” Roman held his hand over his forehead like a visor to help his distance vision in the late afternoon sun. The gray whales were putting on quite a show with their breaching off shore. He’d been looking for a sign he’d done the right thing since getting the neuronet put on his brain, staring blankly at the ocean with his bare feet at the edge of the water. He was thinking more of a plane falling out of the sky or the sun going supernova or perhaps an unscheduled solar eclipse, a flashing meteor painting fire across the sky, dolphins floundering in record number against the coast… Shame on him for letting the tough times affect his thinking. Okay, looking for signs and believing in omens was probably the first indication his neuronet was misfiring. Then again…
He ran giddily along the shore, laughing, whooping, waving at the breaching whales, screaming, “Thank you! Thank you!” Back and forth he darted like a cuckoo bird tracing its path on a chiming clock. Each time having to step over a log he couldn’t be bothered to look down at to keep from tripping.
This time he heard the log cough. He glanced down to spy the woman who’d washed ashore
. Covered in seaweed. Looking whiter than a ghost. Lips blue. She gasped as if it was the first breath of air she’d taken in days. She started to shiver. “What the hell?” Roman muttered.
He kneeled down and took her in his arms. She was shivering so much she was making him shake. He brought her closer and rocked back and forth in an effort to warm her and steady the earthquakes she was sending through him.
Something was off about her. Besides her washing up ashore like some mermaid.
Her engineering schematics popped up in his field of vision, like a holoscreen projection a few feet in front of him. She was wired to the nines. Sensor plates over her entire surface. Buckyball wiring throughout her body, connecting the plates, paralleling the nervous system she was born with. Wrist band AI-enabled generator-batteries. Tech unknown. Why was he seeing blow ups of her genetic structure? Shiiiiit! She was CRISPR-enabled. He was suddenly feeling like he’d won the big prize at the bingo game.
The fact that none of her enhancements were visible to the naked eye might well be a clue as to her true identity. Then again, his neuronet was hardly noticeable either.
She’s got magic, all right. Your neuronet hasn’t done a damn thing for two weeks now. Couldn’t tell if you even had it in. So much so that his shadow, Hatter, had abandoned him, staying back at the techno-hippie compound to do more surgeries. Business was better than ever now that he was at biohacker central.
The girl opened her eyes. Her color was gradually returning. “Hey, Mr. ‘these boots are made for walking, and that’s just what they’ll do’.”
“Shit, sorry. I wasn’t looking for mermaids, just those fish that look like giant boners.” He tilted his head up at the still-breeching whales to cue her. Then he tilted down to his crotch. “Sorry, guess I’ve got a thing for half-dead chicks.”
“You wouldn’t be the first one.”
With the help of his neuronet he saw her electrical system flare to life, revitalizing her in the process and speeding her recovery. Her lips had gone from blue to a rich red in quick order.
“Whoa, girl’s got game. Any more wired and the lights would dim from here to Georgia.”
She stood up, pulled seaweed off herself, ran her hand through her hair, and groaned. “No, just here to Montana.”
“Too cool.”
“Two biohackers running into one another in Oregon. What are the odds?”
She must have figured the only way he could have known about her was to be like her. “Pretty good, actually,” he said. This place is Biohacker heaven.”
“What upgrades do you have? And stop staring at me like I’m fresh meat.”
He smiled at her. Taking in the thick eyebrows that went on forever. The freakishly large almond eyes. The small nose. The complexion—now that blood was circulating through her again—with more subtle hues than a Renoir painting. All the sponging up of her facial beauty, mind you, so he could keep his eyes from her exposed nipples and orange-sized breasts. “Wet clothes wear well on you.”
She grew self-conscious of how her garb outlined her figure then shot him an unkind smile. “In your dreams, pretty boy.”
Pretty boy? Okay, he supposed he deserved that. With his long hair in the front brushed upwards and backwards, it was a men’s quiff style straight out of The Idle Man. He’d gone so far as to apply sea salt spray to the do to keep it in check for moments like this. The whole point of the lifted fringe was to give him a stylish yet casual look. Fine, factor in the thick eyebrows, the dark hair against his white skin, the two-day old beard and moustache, yeah, he was devastating. This was the first time devastating hadn’t worked for him.
“I go more for the Frankenstein monster types,” she said. “You were saying about your endowment?”
He glanced at his crotch again and smiled wickedly. Her face just grew sterner. He cleared his throat and said, “Got the neuronet.”
She missed the beat. Too busy turning to stone. But finally said, “Mother of God. You are the Frankenstein monster.”
“And they say there’s no such thing as destiny.”
“Where are the rest of our people? I have no desire to be alone with you until the kinks are ironed out on that thing.” She reached down and picked up a piece of driftwood to use as a club.
He took one look at her weapon of choice and said, “You know, I like to think that our humanity will get us through whatever ravages our transhumanity might unleash on the world.” She loosened the grip on her club only slightly.
“Come on, I’ll take you.” He did the Frankenstein walk for her, along with the proper monster groans.
She rolled her eyes. “Adolescent humor. God give me strength.”
“Hey, I’m eighteen!”
“He says as if to prove me wrong.”
“You can’t be much more than that.”
“I’m twenty-one, way too old for you. And that’s if you didn’t look sixteen.”
“I like older women.”
She frowned. “Let me guess, you became the smartest person in the world so you could bore me to death.”
He swallowed hard. There was more than saliva slipping down his throat. A fair amount of self-esteem was draining away along with it. “This way,” he said without further ado.
FOUR
“What happened to you, if you don’t mind me asking?” Roman was fighting the urge to stare at his recently acquired mermaid, though it wasn’t particularly easy. She went by the name of Elsa.
“You mean what caused me to wash up on your shore? Got no idea.” She was regarding the slant of the mountain and the climb ahead with distinct discomfort written on her face. Her breathing remained labored, which was good for Roman, as it caused her chest to rise and fall in the most hypnotic of fashions.
“What do you remember?”
“Not much. But I’m one cold-hearted bitch. I can tell you that much.”
“What makes you say that?”
She fought with her hair in the breeze the way she seemed to be fighting with her own nature. She’d added groaning with each step to the ensemble of heavy breathing and pained faces. As far as he could tell, these were all pluses for him; it was exactly the kind of response he’d want if she was directly under him.
“The few memories that I can access don’t have me doing or saying nice things,” she explained. “Christ, I can even feel it in my body. This is not a person comfortable in her own skin.”
“So, this is your chance to be born again, just like me?” He pointed to his head to cue her he was referring to his neuronet.
“Stop forcing the storyline, Romeo, with all these improbable connections between us. Something tells me we’re star-crossed lovers only in your wildest fantasies.”
“Yeah, I guess,” he said half-heartedly.
She acted as if she didn’t know what was more depressing, looking up at the incline ahead and the distance they still had to go, or looking down at her feet to make sure she didn’t trip on every step, the rocks and potholes notwithstanding. “How much longer to your commune?”
“Another mile or so maybe.”
She glanced back at the ocean below. It was miles and miles away. The slope of the mountain being the only thing that allowed a view. “How in God’s earth did we get here?”
“The hard way. You’ve been silent a lot. Thought you were just ignoring me, or politely giving me enough chance to stare until I got it out of my system. But it occurs to me that you may be losing time up in your head. You should probably run a systems check. Make sure those memories of your past that you’ve been searching for all this time aren’t being erased as rapidly as you recall them. If you’re losing time, you could also be losing grey matter. Your brain isn’t built to channel that much juice, I don’t care how many modifications you have done to yourself.”
She sighed and took a breather from propelling herself forward. “You may be right. At least you can be useful when you’re not being annoying.”
He regarded her as she looked distant o
nce more. “Great, now she’s going offline again to do a systems check.” The sarcasm appeared wasted on her, if she heard him at all.
She focused her eyes again after a time. They had resumed walking and must have been a half-mile further up the mountain. Elsa uncoupled her wrist bands. “You were right. The AI in the wristbands is picking up on electrical surges in my brain, which it associates with trauma. And it’s attempting to erase the traumatic episodes. It turned me into a walking, talking electroshock machine.”
“Gotta love self-evolving algorithms. No worries. We have a surgeon in camp. The one who did my neuronet. He’ll have you right as Oregon rain in no time.”
“Just need him to fix the wristbands. I’m relatively defenseless without them. I don’t do nature for the same reason.” She ripped his tee shirt off him to wipe the sweat beading on her brow. When he finished smiling at her, stunned by the thoughtless casualness and impetuosity of her act, he gestured at his magnificently ripped torso to convey, “impressed yet?” She just shook her head slowly and sighed.
Roman did a quick evaluation of her upgrades, extrapolated as to likely weaponized uses for them and put two and two together. The neuronet again. Ordinarily it would take him hours of meditation on the diagrams to even guess at some of the possible weapons applications. But he ran through all possible applications in just a few seconds, probably landing on some she’d yet to discover. “Yeah, I get why you don’t do nature.” Out here, she’d be the most likely ground for lightning strikes, not the trees. Inside a city, she could pull whatever electricity she needed off the grid, in whatever amounts she could handle, as opposed to risking being overwhelmed by nature’s fury.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “we get to town often enough to pick up supplies. If something goes down there, you can take point. And we have plenty of people at the commune who can run defense for you in the meantime. Not that there’s much interference to run. Oregon is a synonym for weird-ass communes. Biohackers don’t warrant a second look. We’re a pretty quiet lot, what’s more, so no one pays us much mind.”
Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents Page 2