Alas, it wasn’t what he was going for, but it would play well to the cameras. His droid camera entourage, finished shooting the final scene, followed him up and away from Unser’s fortress of solitude.
As penance for his misdeeds, Ethan spent the rest of the flight back parceling out a good chunk of Unser’s billions. Creating school programs that would feed needy children so they could concentrate on learning instead of their empty stomachs. He bought up swatches of endangered rainforests threatened by ice cream companies determined to burn them to the ground and replace them with palm oil plantations. And, well, so many good causes, and so much bad money to spread around on them.
SIX
Elsa found her way to Roman as the theater lights were going up and the barn was emptying. People were filing out in twos, threes, and fours, not a lot of happy faces among them, and engaged in a fair amount of grumbling under their breath. Storm clouds gathering, she’d say. “So, word has reached me that the movie’s star is your best friend, Ethan,” she said, plopping down beside him on the bale of hay. “What happened to peace and love, baby?” she said making a mock peace sign with her fingers.
“Sometimes the sermons don’t take.”
“The sermons?”
“Yeah, I’m kind of the visionary around here. It’s my role to keep everyone looking to the future, the far brighter future we’re all making. The biohackers are the advanced wave. But some people want to keep dragging us back into the past. Looks like Ethan decided to join up with them.”
“If you ask me, he’s the visionary.”
He glowered at her. If Ethan’s betrayal had felt like a punch to the stomach, her comment felt like a kick to the nuts.
“Look, man, I get it,” she said, parting her hair. “You have comfortable middle-class upbringing written all over you. Life is bountiful, safe, good. Things always work out, hurdles are overcome with the help of friends, family, and people with connections. Study hard, work hard, you’ll get ahead. It’s the middle class dream. You buy into it hook, line and sinker.”
“No, I don’t.” His bitten down fingernails started hurting. Maybe they were calling attention to themselves because her remarks felt like needles driven under them.
“Yeah, sure, you’re happy to rebel against the boring parts, the suburbanite tract homes, the cookie-cutter mentalities, the comfort for comfort’s sake. Surround yourself with plenty of colorful characters so you can pretend like you’re rebelling against all that. But deep down, you’re one of them. A believer. A believer that life is fundamentally good. Well, wake up, asshole.” She slapped him across the face. “The middle class is gone, most people are like me, either living on the street, or one paycheck away from it. And there is no escape. Degrees just mean Herculean debts, not jobs at the end of the rainbow. Fewer jobs each year on account of automation, software, self-help IVRs, robotics, self-driving cars and trucks.
“The only people who can hold down jobs anymore are geniuses with engineering and science degrees. And soon they won’t be employable either, because the robots will be designing themselves, making themselves ever smarter at a learning curve no human can match. Twenty years maybe until we’re all out of work. Thirty years before robots make us not only irrelevant, but a damn hazard to the environment and life in general.”
“Looks like you got some preacher in you too.” He’d managed to keep his tone even, if a bit somber and pistol-whipped, despite the roller coaster ride of emotions she was sending him on.
She snorted, cat-stretching into another equally uncomfortable pose, at least from his perspective. “What I got is a lot of hate and anger in me. Life grows meaner, people get meaner to adapt. Something tells me I was more like Ethan once upon a time. We’re the ones that should be partners in crime, not you and I. Sorry, lover, but you aren’t Romeo in this story.”
He pulled the straw out of her hair. “I guess you believe likes attract, not opposites.”
She sighed. “Maybe if I needed rescuing from myself...”
“Don’t you?”
They stared hard at one another, each refusing to give in. “I look forward to your sermons, preacher. Maybe you talk a good enough game you’ll sell me on this opposites attract thing.”
“You baiting me?”
“You’re learning.” She got up and sashayed out of the barn fully aware he was staring at her pendulum-swinging ass the whole way. God, they could be king and queen of the prom. Why was she making this so difficult?
***
They ambushed him as soon as he was out of the theater. Roman found himself surrounded by the most outspoken, opinionated members of Daytona, the name of their little techno-commune. They were named after the Daytona 500 because, well, they were speeding into the future faster than everyone else, so what else were they going to call themselves?
“We’ve been listening to Neil,” one of them said.
“When has that ever led to anything but stomach upset?”
“He makes some good points.”
“Like?” Roman fought to keep his impatience in check, binding his tongue for starters.
“Like,” Anoki explained, “Ethan is too smart for them to come at directly. They’ll infiltrate the biohacker groups until they lock on to a trail that leads right back here. You’re putting us all at risk, man. You have to leave.”
“Yeah, points like that,” one of them said. “Yeah, like that,” a few of them echoed.
“You’d be lost without me. How are you going to spend your days? Sticking electroplates under one another’s asses and levitating each other with the emissions coming from your metal-repelling fingertips?”
“Hey, not bad. Why didn’t we think of that?” said one earnestly.
“In case you haven’t noticed, we’re the lost generation. We do just fine being lost,” said another.
“That was the 60s,” Roman said. “You nouveau hippies are supposed to do what your predecessors couldn’t, translate dreams of a brighter future into action. And who better to lead you than me?”
“We decided we’d rather be unenlightened and alive than enlightened and dead.”
“Which voice in this chorus of fear are you again?” Roman snapped. “The Promised Land can’t be gotten to without lots of heart and abject fearlessness. Faith in ourselves and what we stand for. Self-confidence, self-esteem even when others paint us as losers. If I didn’t build you up every day you tear yourselves down, you’d never get out of bed in the morning, just hang back getting high.”
“Strange how I agree with everything you’re saying and I still want you gone.” It was another mouth from the throng bigger than the brain wielding it.
Roman sighed. He’d felt punch-drunk after his little encounter with Elsa in the barn. But this was an all-out beat down. He was lying on the ground, bloody, bleeding, and barely hanging on. But he couldn’t show them that. “Look, let’s see how this plays out. The wolves start to close in, I’ll do what I can to lead them away from you. I’ll leave.”
“And take your girlfriend with you.” It was the sentiment of another disembodied voice.
“Why, what’s she got to do with it?”
“Neil, tell him, like you told us.”
“She keeps you grounded. Point, counterpoint. Nature seeks a balance.”
Roman took a deep breath. “What, you all listening into our conversations now?”
“Duh. What do you think the sousveillance society is? Everybody watching everybody, unlike our current Nazi state where only our oppressors have their eyes on everybody. True liberation in a transparent society means everyone watching everyone’s back.” That might have been Anoki voicing the pearl of wisdom, Roman honestly couldn’t tell. He was so disgusted, he was barely looking at any of them anymore.
“I’d be happy to take her with me when the time comes, but I think that decision is up to her.”
They all shook their heads. “Nah.”
“Anoki did some extrapolations,” said another voice enjoying
the anonymity the darkness and the crowd’s numbers gave him.
Anoki was one of the ones with a mindchip and a penchant for scenario games. He was pure-blooded Native American and looked the part with his long jet black hair and red skin and traditional Stone Age clothing, down to the moccasins.
There were other telltale signs of his heritage. He’d augmented his mindchip with a physical attachment that covered his third eye in a complex mandala pattern. The mandala in turn was connected to two no-less-intricately-carved plates just above his eyebrows. Native Americans, like the Buddhists, Sufis, and Hindus, believed in chakras running through the body; it was part of their energy medicine. Chief among these chakras was the third eye at the center of the forehead over which Anoki’s mandala was perched. In Anoki’s mind, if in no one else’s, the mandala served to course correct his mindchip’s search through possible alternate realities, weeding out the less likely ones. For much of the biohacker community the notion was sheer hokum. But there was no questioning the power of his scenario sifting.
Anoki decided to speak up on his own behalf, stepping forward into the spill light of the Robot-wars in the distance. “As I see it, you’ll end up leading us remotely, once we all figure out how to lock down the communication channels between your mind and ours with self-evolving quantum algorithms no one can hack.”
Martha interjected herself into the data dump with a harrumph, moving to the front of the pack, into the same spill light. She was maybe 5’ 4” with curly red hair and a thick, muscular tomboy body. “Of course, we’ll have to figure out how to boost transmission power over vast distances in the absence of access to the dark internet, power grids, and all the other techie comforts. No small feat.”
No one but no one played the EMF bands better than Martha. They were already several generations ahead of what even DARPA had access to on account of her when it came to wireless communications.
Her upgrades included a satellite array running along tracks tracing the length of her body, much like the radio telescopes in New Mexico. Each cone was no wider at its outermost circumference than a silver dollar. The tracks were provided by a belt she wore around her waist and a Gladiator-like outfit that provided leather stripes running from her ankles to her waist to provide more tracks for her miniature satellite dishes. She had those leather stripes running along each arm as well. No one knew what she was actually searching for with her proprietary tech. To ask would have been to share in her madness. No one wanted to get that sucked in.
“I’m working on modifying the mindchips to communicate by way of singularity pulses,” Orion said, stepping to the front of the pack, “essentially opening small wormholes that information can traffic along. Providing, of course, I can figure out how to keep from blowing up our minds and the rest of the planet in the process. I’ll get with Hatter and Martha on that, the three of us putting our heads together maybe… but I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I?”
Orion was their solid-state physics guy, their theoretical physicist, and master mindchip designer. A lot of the guys tweaked their own chips for their own ends, but seldom did anyone do that without running their ideas past Orion. He was nearly a foot taller than anyone in the group with his burly build, salt and pepper curly hair and beard. He combed his fingers through his beard to help him think.
Orion sported leather arm and wrist bands, a sleeveless leather vest and leather leg-fittings protecting his shins. All in all, he looked just like a Viking, minus, of course, the red hair. But what looked like intricately carved adornments worn for protection in battle against swords and battle axes were in fact casings for auxiliary computer chips of his making. The flexible chips lined the underside of the fittings and connected to his nervous system by a number of pinprick probes. Only Orion could not be satisfied with just one mindchip.
No one had mentioned the small matter of not everyone in the community being chipped as far as this proposed distributed communications network went of remote leadership and followship, Roman thought. Apparently that problem for later too.
“You’re all getting ahead of yourselves, way ahead,” Roman said. “We have a few months yet while the federal bureaucracies trip over themselves trying to close the net on Ethan to figure out how best to deal with this situation. Or does our scenarios guy disagree?” Roman made a sour face in Anoki’s direction.
“Closer to a month. The Feds don’t trip over one another like they used to post 9-11. If I might just have the floor without further interruption… We need to anchor the visionary to the pragmatist if we’re to trust you as a wartime leader as much as a peacetime leader, Roman, that means Elsa has to go in tow.”
“And what if she disagrees?”
“We’ll reprogram her. Or threaten to fry her brain. Whatever works.”
Roman grimaced. “I’m sure she’ll appreciate the soft touch.”
“Can I get to the good parts?” Anoki protested.
“Yeah, Anoki, get to the good parts, tell him,” one of the choir voices said.
“In the very strong likelihood that you’ll go insane either gradually over time or rapidly with the prototype neuronet rewiring you twenty-four seven, you’ll need a very strong connection to the mortal coil to find your way back out of the labyrinth of your head again. You’ll need a distinct voice you can trust to give it to you straight. You’ll need a friend that’s in some ways even more of an enemy, who doesn’t mind tearing you down so you won’t be tempted to do it to yourself.”
“Fine, I’m sold, even if Elsa isn’t.”
“And you should have lots of sex,” Anoki said.
“You’re right, we are getting to the good part.”
“Hatter has analyzed her CRISPR-modified genes. They’re like little CRISPR and MAGE units themselves, able to evolve rapidly under stress. Sharing bodily fluids with her is the best way to get some of those genes into you where they might be needed to…”
“Correct my defective wiring,” Roman finished the thought for Munser, their resident geneticist. Though he spent most of his time growing Findhorn-like super-vegetables. Since Elsa had been in camp all but a few hours, Roman had to assume Hatter did this assessment remotely by hacking her mindchip.
“It’s highly possible even your neuronet won’t be any match for Elsa’s retroviral emissaries,” Anoki explained. After a beat he added, “Hatter will not be going with. We need him more than you do at this point. He’ll have to remote surgery you through anything that calls for his skill sets.”
“He’s not going to take that well,” one of the voices in the choir said.
“No shit. His cache in the biohacker community will take a huge hit if the Roman project fails.”
Roman rubbed his temples, afraid his head was going to explode. Finally he gasped, “Fine, the brain trust has the greenlight to play defense all they want up until D-day, being when and if I actually decide to leave. Until then, leave the kiddies alone to do what they do best, preach the gospel according to me. They’ll need their own group mind effect to remind them what they’re fighting for, if it comes to fighting. And I’ll need a team to run offense when it comes to building my better tomorrows right under the noses of these pricks who want to drag us into the past and keep us there. Agreed? Or do I have to shoot somebody?”
“Hmm, aggression,” Neil said. “There’s hope for him yet.”
“I suggest you guys get back to partying all night if you’re running on sleep-free DARPA meds, or getting a good night’s rest. First thing tomorrow morning we’re having a come to Jesus meeting where I will lay out some more of what the future is really all about.”
Roman trudged off; he’d have stomped off if he had any more energy left in him. He needed some solitude and space in his head to think.
“Is it me or is that guy seriously full of himself?”
“The future requires heart and…” Jester said mocking Roman’s voice, “and someone with a Christ complex.” The others laughed.
Jester was their
master showman whose biopunk enhancements possibly made him the greatest showman of all. He was the only one besides Roman who could hold court to the multitudes for any length of time and expect to keep everyone’s rapt attention. He was done up like a court jester of Medieval times. Much of his heavy metal was visible beneath the skin, making it a less than smooth surface. Some of it was grafted onto his exterior, screwed straight into his skull or the other bones of his endoskeleton. He was part of that contingent in the community that believed the more cyborg-like one looked the better.
Roman could hear Jester making fun of him as he put some distance between himself and his tormentors.
The cold, damp night air was nipping at his heels, squeezing his cheeks, stabbing his eyes. When his blood was up along with the rest of them in their heated exchange he hadn’t noticed; he had defense enough against it. But the shield had fallen, no doubt his heart weakened from all the battery, so no longer able to shunt the warm blood to this surface. The smell of charcoal and burning wood from all the campfires enveloped him. It was ostensibly a sign of life off in the distance but up close it just added to his sensation of walking through a harsh, unforgiving wasteland, the ruins of everything he’d built. The distant fires themselves, offering the only light in the blackness, seemed but just more proof of the scorched earth through which he hiked. With the robot dragon emitting flames and the other self-illuminated dinosaurs still going at one another… well, they didn’t exactly deter from the end days vibe.
SEVEN
Four-Star General Chao stepped up to Sabrina, struggling to match her pace. She granted him a few seconds to gawk at her. Her full lips, even closed, looked like a better portal to Narnia and magical realms than any the classic sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke ever wrote about. Her long hair, parted just to the left of the midline, fell over her shoulders with the same ease and grace with which she walked and conducted herself in all matters. Her generous forehead just seemed to highlight that big brain of hers. Her large lips and eyes, once a symbol of passiveness, in her case, were more of a baited trap. There was nothing passive about this woman. Her olive skin, dark hair and eyes, suggested Hispanic blood pumped through her veins, but he suspected it didn’t travel alone. The deliciously complex, layered aromas wafting from her made her read like a fine aged wine for all her agelessness. He’d touched her satiny-smooth skin once and hadn’t been able to touch another woman since. The corridors of the Pentagon were serving for their morning constitutional as they strode alongside one another. “You look like an Olivia De Berardinis pinup poster in that outfit,” he said.
Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents Page 5