“To shockproof the future everyone must be a freedom fighter, not just a precious few. Otherwise the powers that be cannot be touched. By exposing ourselves we only make them stronger and us weaker.”
He paused to let them get more of their venom out. He knew, otherwise, no amount of talking was going to do it. He could speechify on the fly like the best of them, but a crowd had to do what a crowd did if only to get it out of their systems.
“What are we going to do? Sit around and watch them take us apart one by one while we do nothing? Nothing but escape into la la land with you? Make peace not war sounds great until you start watching these psychos go to work on people you love.” That voice came from the deck directly below.
“You want to strike back?” Roman said.
“Yes!” the crowd roared back. “We need to do something, God damn it!” another one shouted, getting cheers in the process.
“Then, let’s talk about what we’re going to do,” Roman said. “Orion here will explain to you how for every small prick they give us, we will come back at them with the hammer of God.”
Orion looked at him like he was mad. “I will?” he said in an unsure voice not meant to carry.
“Just talk out your ass if you have to, Orion. Not sure anyone around here really understands you, anyway,” Roman whispered. “The man of the hour, people,” Roman said, raising his voice this time and clapping and whistling to get the crowd going. This time the reaction spread like a fever, and everyone was pounding the decking with their feet. Thank God for Redwood trees that could last through anything.
“There’s something we should probably talk about first,” Orion whispered.
“Not now, Orion.” Roman waved his hands to get another rise out of the crowd, indicating, ‘That the best you can do?’ And the roar grew louder.
Orion sighed and leaned forward over the balcony, resting his hands on the banister. He held up his hand and there was dead silence. Roman was rather envious of his abilities, if truth be known. “I’ve worked out a communication system between mindchips that will allow any of our people who are chipped to communicate with one another. The system cannot be hacked, and there’s no time delay, no matter how spread out around the world we are. It’s based on singularity pulses, opening pin-prick-size worm holes to traffic the data.”
The latest gust of winds blowing through the trees was entirely swallowed up by the gaping mouths. There were gasps of, “Dear God.” “Mother of Christ.” “It’s just not possible.” “We could end up frying our minds.” “Frying our minds?” one scoffed. “We could end up taking out the friggin’ planet! Not that I’m not in the mood for that right now.” “You’re crazy!” “We can’t risk it.” Orion held up his palm and again there was dead silence from the gaggle of hecklers.
“I’ve already done it with my mindchip. In fact, I’ve opened up a communications link to Irvin.”
Roman’s eyes went wide. Guess that’s what he meant about talking together first.
The crowd erupted again. “Holy shit!” “That’s great!” “What do you mean that’s great? The bastard will lead them right to us? They don’t have to hack the signal to track it.”
“Silence!” Orion thundered. “Do not interrupt me again.” Everyone quieted as if the nun teaching the class in a Catholic school just walked in the room. “I realized I needed to build a cloaking device for the chip before I sent the initial pulse. With it installed, not even the most advanced scanners on earth will know you’re chip-enhanced. The signal itself is not even detectible because it exists outside of space-time. You’d need compatible technology to even realize there’s a broadcast system in place, which doesn’t exist, because I haven’t built it yet.”
Orion took a deep breath. “I’m downloading the design specifics for the chip now to the chiphead designers in our community.” There were more gasps as eyes went vacant to stare at the blueprints popping up in the third eyes of the chipheads in question.
“Holy shit!” Several of them whispered afraid of violating Orion’s edict.
“They will task themselves with democratizing the technology,” Orion continued, “making it cheap enough, fast enough, with a mini-fab the size of a desktop that can be assembled anywhere. The rest of you will work on technologies to get it inside people without biohacker surgeons. So they can just rest it on their forearms and it will burrow under the skin for them, be flexible and thin enough so as not to be detectible.”
“Shit, please tell us he’s going to download the blueprints for that next,” one of them said in a respectable tone.
“I’ll oversee each project team to help you meet the kind of time crunches we’re under,” he said with a wave of his hand. There were audible signs of relief.
Hatter, one floor down, made a sour face. “There goes my franchise,” he muttered.
“Irvin will also be consulting you,” Orion said.
“The ten year old?” one of them erupted, then immediately apologized for raising his voice. “Sorry, sir,” he said more respectfully.
“The boy may be even better than me,” Orion said. “And now, thanks to the bad guys, he’s got nothing to do but help us usher in a new age.”
“Go, Irvin!” one of them shouted.
“So, yeah, all things considered,” Orion said, “today the bad guys scored one, we scored a hundred.”
The crowd burst into shouts, catcalls, claps, and cheers.
Orion stepped back from the balcony, evidently done talking for now. Roman stepped up, trying to get a word in edgewise. He may as well have been invisible. He cleared his throat, “Um, a little help, big guy.”
Orion, retiring to the darkness of his upper level cave, stopped, turned, stepped back to the balcony, and held out his hand. Dead silence ensued. His part done, he returned to his work station, identified by the glowing lights in the darkness at the far end of “the cave.”
“They made a critical mistake releasing that footage to intimidate us,” Roman said. “Now we know what their pawns look like, but they don’t know who our people are. So let your minds rest easy as you proceed with your assignments.” And with that, Roman was done as well, and the crowds were thinning, heading back to their own respective hobbit hutches.
Roman instantly regretted having to get in the last word. Let’s hope my ego doesn’t make a bigger mess of things by setting the wrong expectations.
FOURTEEN
Preston gazed at Irvin, lying in a coma in the hospital room, all sorts of hoses and monitors attached to him, then checked his watch. “I just don’t think they appreciate the schedule we’re working with here,” he said impatiently. Then he stormed out of the room.
Thirty-seven minutes and twenty-nine seconds later Preston was getting out of his beamer, along with two of his cybernetic clones. They each took a moment to trim themselves up, either donning a pair of flashy shades, dusting the lint off a jacket, or squirting a taste of Binaca into their mouths. The metallic taste that was constantly on their tongues was ungodly, but worse, it stank up the room.
Their destination clearly in sight, The Heavenly Aromas Café, they marched without further ado towards the picture of serenity on the other side of the proprietor’s window. Couples were chatting and sharing lattes and chocolate croissants. Waiters busied themselves with taking orders or delivering them. There wasn’t so much as a laptop in sight.
It was all a lie, of course. The picture window was in fact a see-through flexipanel screen that could project whatever image it wanted to hide what was actually going on inside.
***
“Shit, guys. This doesn’t look good.” Ike was standing working his virtual keypad display on his virtual wrap around monitor that went from the floor to just about six foot two inches off the ground; he was six foot even. He had been putting the final touches on a moon base for China, handling the design and engineering, along with the pragmatic breakdown of steps that would be required for the self-replicating robots to build the base on site f
rom existing materials, namely moon rock.
But as captivating as the moon base image was, the sight of the three cybernetic agents coming towards the café was even more impressive. “Guys!” he shouted, dismissing his virtual screen with a wave of the hand. “I think they’ve seen through our subterfuge. Run or die!”
Gaddy, God bless him, stoned out of his mind, seeing double everywhere he looked, slurring his speech, said, “Talk plaeaaaan, maaan. I cand onderstand a weird you’re sating.”
“Time to hit the eject button, Gaddy,” Ike said, pressing the button on his mindchip on his forearm. He was instantly sober, jumping out of the seat, sending the stogie in his one hand and the beer in his other flying.
“Shit!” Gaddy said, eying the agents coming towards the door.
“Moped!” Gaddy shouted. “You running the security protocols?”
Moped was their bartender, at least to the outer world. In reality, he was their surgeon, serving up whatever biotech was ordered at the counter, the offerings in clear display overhead, just as a real coffee bar would lay out its cappuccino menu. Moped cocked his shotgun, “Shit, yeah.”
“I don’t mean those countermeasures, dufus,” Gaddy said.
“Yeah, I know.”
Gaddy opened his mouth and let out an alien cry that many a sci-fi filmmaker had paid big bucks for. He had a whole repertoire of them. Everyone lost in cyberland in the café was present and accounted for by the time the shriek ended. They had stilled whatever films they were making on their mindchips to challenge Spielberg with, no production or post-production team necessary, no cast and no budget either. They had stopped whatever solar-system terraforming projects they’d been hired to design in VR by the powers that be determined to mine the asteroid belt for huge profits.
That left six girls and five guys standing briefly in shock before fleeing like cockroaches for all the exits. The café had twenty-five of them to accommodate the twenty-five patrons that was its capacity audience, and each of them knew where their exit was so no one would be stumbling over one another to use the same one. Think trap doors, sliding panels, and everything you’d usually find in a Medieval Castle.
The cybernetic agents entered with their usual aplomb. One stepped through the glass window as if it weren’t there. The other grabbed the door and sent it flying into traffic so hard it cut the roof of the car off and guillotined the guy inside driving, his wife, and just left the two kids in the back seat to stare dumbstruck before emitting an ear-piercing scream.
For a second Gaddy turned toward the kids out in the street, no doubt wondering if he should add their combined scream to his repertoire.
The security measures took.
One of the clones convulsed and shimmied from the electrical jolt delivered up through the floor. Moped’s robot coffee maker—who actually did make coffee—insulated from the floor by his rubber booties, punched him in the gut and sent him flying out into the street. The cybernetic agent landed against the side panel of the passing semi-truck moving slowly in the opposite lane. The driver was still trying to get his mind around the sight of the guillotined couple in the car in the lane next to him.
***
“Whatever truck that fell out of,” the semi driver said, staring at the steel-framed glass door lying on the street, “hope that poor bastard is halfway to Kansas by now.”
At the sound of the impact against his truck, he braked and got out to take in the sight of the FRE agent embossed in the side of the semi-trailer, just so, that he covered the image of Superman in flight that the company had gone with. All that you could see now of the underlying image was the red cape caught in the wind above the cybernetic agent dangling in midair. The driver could still read the words though. “FREE MAX FLIES YOUR FRIENDLY SKIES TOO.”
“Yeah, that works,” the driver said, taking the cigar out of his mouth. “Looks better than the damn drawing, to tell you the truth.” The agent even had his fists cocked the way superman did when he was flying. The driver got back in the truck and headed on down the street.
***
The Tesla bulb-like effect of being hit by lightning from all four walls incapacitated the second agent inside the Heavenly Aromas Café. He withstood the blast as long as he could before he went down. His impact with the floor was such that he dented the metal plates being used to electrify the room.
The third agent was hopping around the room like Spiderman, refusing to touch the ground, and sticking to the walls. His gecko-like grip was provided by the superconductive coils coursing over his body. He’d discarded his shoes and socks so he could better hold on with his feet. He seemed more high-functioning than the other two agents, which was strange because all the pawns looked exactly alike; it was why the cybernetic agents were often also referred to as clones.
Moped was taking pot shots at him with the shotgun. The solid shotgun shells just sparked briefly before bouncing off him.
The patient in Moped’s hot seat, his brain pan pulled back and his brain exposed, not believing what he was seeing but stoically holding it together all the same, looked around for an ashtray for his cigarette. He ended up dumping the ashes heedlessly on his brain when he couldn’t find another suitable receptacle. The resulting twitching and writhing in the chair had him convulsing and spinning the chair one way then the other, banging up against Moped, and interrupting Moped’s accuracy with the shotgun.
Giving the third agent time to jump from the wall he was stuck to onto the counter of the “bar.” He yanked the shotgun out of Moped’s arms and shoved the stock into his mouth so hard, it came out the back of his head.
The agent immediately scanned the room along the EMF spectrum. Isolated the hidden control panel. Cut a hole in the wall with the lasers from his bionic eyes and bore through the metal box the circuitry was housed in. Once the circuitry was exposed, he yanked the exposed brain out of the head of the patient in the chair and threw it at the junction box, shorting it out. Killing the Tesla lightning searching for him just as it reached the agent. It was his convulsing under the numerous strands of electricity in fact that had restricted his range of motion and left him little option but to throw the brain of the man seated in the barber’s chair.
The third agent reacquired his shoes and socks, taking the time to brush off the scuff marks of his patent leathers.
With the electrical field short-circuited, agent number two picked himself up off the floor. And started scouring the place for prey. He was all business, wasting no time. He couldn’t even be bothered to step around fallen furniture, just crushed it under his feet.
Preston grimaced at the man’s artlessness. Refused to be brought down by it. Instead he rotated his cufflinks so they sparkled against the sun streaming in through the window better. Joining the search, he said, “Oh come out, come out, wherever you are!”
***
The agent sent into the side-panel of the semi trucking down the street came to. He crawled out of the tight space he’d been wedged into and ran down the street to get back to his assignment.
He just kicked cars out of the way that got in his path, sending them airborne for destinations he couldn’t be bothered to check. He did the same with the motorcycle zooming towards him, flipping it end over end and sending its driver flying through the air and bouncing off the hood of a semi to land in a barber’s chair in a real barber shop.
The out-to-lunch barber just put down his beer, upon hearing what he took to be the tinkling of the doorbell instead of the shattering of the window, faced the client in the chair and said, “Shave with that haircut, boss?”
When he got no answer from the dead man, he said, “Yeah, yeah, that’s what they all want,” and proceeded on autopilot to doll the guy up. A short while later he realized his mistake. “Damn, I didn’t realize I was readying you for your funeral, pal.”
***
Out in the street, the truck driver for FREE MAX checked his side-view mirror and saw the FREE MAX agent running full tilt, sending an
y obstacle in his way flying. “You go, buddy. You explain to them how nothing, and I mean nothing, not rain, not snow, nor traffic congestion slows us down. Just remember to get back in time to fill the logo on the side of the van before I get to where I’m going.” The driver opened his mouth wide, stuck out his tongue, and dropped another tab of acid and smiled.
***
The cybernetic agent on the street caught the motorcycle as it was landing right side up, hopped on the bike and sped off. He parked it beside the biohacker fleeing the shop on the sidewalk. “Sometimes the straight and narrow isn’t the quickest way, buddy,” the agent said, hopping off the bike and looking at the man comically running in place.
“What is that? Some sort of tractor beam?” the biohacker asked, refusing to stop running, despite the evident futility of it.
“Something like that. Every red blood cell in your body has iron at its center. That iron can be magnetized and compelled to respond to the magnetic field I’m currently throwing out.”
“No way!”
“Focus, Phelps,” the agent said, standing before him, hands on his hips, looking up at the gangly teen, still running full bore and getting nowhere.
“What do you want to know, FRE-man?” Phelps panted, and whined, or screeched depending on the sensitivity of one’s ears.
“Nothing, kid. I’ve already peeled what I needed off of your mindchip. This is just to demonstrate what we pawns can do to put the fear of God into the rest of you.”
“Trust me, it’s there already.”
“And still no one seems to be coming forward to save you. Which makes me think desperation hasn’t begun to overpower good sense. So here we are.”
Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents Page 13