***
Hatter had released all the animals from the barn. Witnessed by the fact that Roman was tripping over goats, sheep, cows, horses, llamas, pigs. It was a God damn Louis Bunuel movie he had walked into, the critters roving wantonly through a hi-tech enclave, looking brutally out of place.
Once inside the barn, Roman froze in his tracks. He needed a moment to process what he was seeing. Suddenly it was looking more like an Orson Welles film, The Trial, to be precise. Or maybe the equally surreal Brazil. “What the hell?”
There was an Escher-like effect of barber chairs filling the barn as if someone had stuck a mirror on both sides of Hatter. Roman was convinced that’s what it was, some paranoid way of camouflaging himself during wartime so Hatter could keep operating as long as possible before they got to him. But in point of fact, those weren’t images of Hatter being reflected back at Roman. Those were the cybernetic agents that had been recruited into the role of Hatter’s surgical minions. The son of a bitch must have had his 3D printers cooking up the extra barber chairs for him.
Hatter, monitoring all conversations going on within the commune twenty-four-seven, must have gotten wind of Melville’s idea to recruit the agents, and decided he had a better calling for the higher functioning ones than chopping wood. He must have hacked the pawns from a distance and sent them running like only they could run towards him. It was the only way he could have compressed time like this.
“What the hell’s going on here?” Roman asked, stepping up to Hatter.
“Oh this?” he said looking around the barn and smiling. “Desperate times…” he returned to his handiwork inside one of the commune’s citizen’s brains, his brain pan peeled open. “They’re surprisingly good surgeons,” Hatter said distractedly. “Steadier hands than I have. Their mindchips are fairly standard, minus minor operating defects from one to another that’s part of their printing process. Though possibly not defects at all. Their most sophisticated feature is the way they manipulate magnetic fields. Never seen anything like it. It’s possible if their own brains are subject to them long enough, the chips become defective over time, influencing mood and behavior in any number of ways.
“Not sure why such an odd adaptation.” Hatter zapped the mindchip to get it to crawl a bit to the left of his patient’s brain and attach itself there instead, continuing to fine tune its placement by his victim’s reactions in the chair. “The fluctuating magnetic fields might be part of a hive mind effect. But with that kind of technology, nuclear fusion toroidal reactors the size of, well of one of their brains, should be more than doable. Suggesting the technology is being kept off-market by the powers that be for reasons that no doubt benefit their bottom line.”
As he prattled, Hatter laid down tracks in the grooves of his patient’s brain, super-conducting coils designed to do only what Hatter divined them to do. Roman had no clue.
“You’re saying each one of the pawns is a nuclear bomb?”
“Possibly. The range adjustable depending on how the magnetic field is massaged, and how much energy is allowed to build up. Sort of takes the whole dirty bomb idea to a whole new level, only, now of course, it’s not suicide bombers we have to worry about, it’s homicidal state officials.” Hatter talked as if he was discussing the weather, far more intrigued by his own surgery.
Roman just groaned. “Look, that discussion for another time. I’ve come to believe that my neuronet has been up to no good.”
“I told you as much when I put it in.” Hatter continued to speak to him, as he customarily did, without looking up from his surgery.
“How could it affect me without my knowing?”
“Easy. It works at light speed, so much faster than your biological brain it would be like staring into the face of God. The light would be so blinding, about all you could pick up was a residual feeling.”
“How does it work with my brain at all then?”
Hatter paused from his handiwork, stood more erect from his hunched over posture he was using to do his surgery. Rubbed his aching lower back. “Ashamed to say I hadn’t given it much thought. I suppose plugging directly into the quantum level of your brain would make the most sense. It would need to channel the energy it used for its computations somehow without frying your biological brain.”
“So, like a quantum computer it thinks across parallel universes?”
Hatter had shifted to rubbing the back of his sore neck, but still managed to nod as if connecting the dots for the first time himself. “That is about the only way to dissipate that much energy without you turning into one of them,” he said pointing at the pawns, “a walking nuclear bomb with so much trapped energy you took out an entire city.”
“But what does that mean?”
“I guess that sort of makes you Multiverse Man, able to jump from one timeline and one universe to another. I’d be careful of doing that though, no telling if you’d ever find your way back to this timeline.”
“What if I’m not wired as a cosmic traveler?”
Hatter, who had resumed his surgery, laying down more golden-threaded tracks in the gyri of his patient’s brain, once again stood up from his surgery, sanding more erect. “Hmm, I seem to remember somewhere that the whole point of the neuronet was to balance you out, make you more even. It was originally designed for psych ward patients, you know? To rebalance their brain chemistry. Only, its trial and error approach to mixing neurochemicals just drove uninitiated minds madder all the sooner.”
“So, I, being a man of peace…?”
Having resumed his track laying, Hatter chuckled. “Yeah, I guess that being the case... Deep down you’re the ultimate war machine,” he said without looking up from his surgery.
Roman shook his head. “We took a wrong turn in our thinking somewhere. No way any of this is possible.”
Hatter said to his patient, “Get up.”
“What?” The guy sounded a bit defensive.
Hatter yanked him out of the chair and sat him on a crate. “I’ll get back to you in a minute.” He turned to Roman. “Hop in the chair. Let’s see what we see.”
Roman sat in the chair. Hatter reclined him and unbuttoned Roman’s shirt. “What are you doing?” Roman asked.
“Pouring caustic acid over you. If I’m wrong, it’ll burn right through you and everything else. Possibly stop reacting about the time it hits China.”
“Comforting.”
“You sure you want to do this?” Hatter said, dangling the beaker of acid over him.
“Pour it over my heart. It’s not like Elsa didn’t cut it out already.”
Hatter gazed around at the entire community, minus just a few members, undergoing upgrades of some form or another in keeping with their own personal evolutionary trajectories, determined to become bigger, badder versions of themselves. And sighed. “You do make the others seem rather conservative by comparison to you. I suppose that’s why you’re my favorite customer.”
He tilted the beaker. “Now, don’t panic if there’s a delayed reaction. If I’m right, your neuronet might not have a solution for how to neutralize the acid in this timeline. It might have to pull it out of one of the other timelines when it ran into this problem in your many daring-do exploits as a god of war. The solution in hand, it will then have to adapt your body accordingly in this timeline.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you might be dead awhile before the neuronet brings you back to life. If you wake up on the floor next to the chair that just means I had time resume surgery on my other patient. Don’t let the disorientation caused by the altered perspective on the room throw you.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
Hatter tilted the beaker back to vertical. His hands shaking as if he might just spill the contents anyway. “You do realize you’re asking me to possibly kill the one hope for a free world?”
“My disciples can carry on without me. They know what they have to do.”
“God, I swear you can’t tell when
I’m joking with you or not anymore.”
“Oh, that was a crack about my Christ complex. Good one. Now just pour the damn acid.”
Following his patient’s instructions as always, Hatter tilted the beaker over Roman, pouring slowly so as not to spill any onto himself. He stopped himself just as the first drop was about to spill. “Shit, better tie you down. Something tells me you’re not exactly sitting still for this, even if you want to.” Hatter engaged the straps on the chair.
And commenced to pour.
Pretty much as expected, the solution started burning a hole through Roman’s chest. It didn’t take much. If Roman didn’t neutralize the solution soon, it would burn through the barber’s chair as well, leaving him with one less surgical venue. If he had to do it again, he’d have staked Roman to the floor first to save his chair. And used the ball gag on him to keep him from screaming. Damn, the screaming. Roman may not ordinarily have been a soprano, but he sure as hell had the range.
The ribs gone. The heart gone. At least Roman was finally quiet. The solution was starting to damage the leather upholstery under Roman when the reaction started reversing itself. It had taken just under two minutes to reach the back of the chair, but Roman was healing much faster. At three minutes, ten seconds into the reaction, Roman opened his eyes, looking perfectly healed, at least from the outside.
“What just happened?” Roman asked.
Hatter shook his head. “No idea. But you were dead for slightly over two minutes.”
“Theories?”
Hatter took a deep breath and whistled it out.
“Hey, can I get a little attention over here?!” said Hatter’s other patient with his brain pan exposed.
“Yeah, yeah,” Roman and Hatter said inattentively. “Just give us a second.”
“I don’t know, dude. Quantum interactions take place outside of time, so even if your neuronet had to retrieve the solution from another timeline, it shouldn’t have slowed things much. It was getting your DNA and RNA encoders to move fast enough in this or any timeline. That’s the real stumbling block. Once working at the molecular level and above, you’re bound by Einstein’s space-time physics, and things work a lot slower at this level. My best guess?”
“Please.”
“In order to make you kill-proof as a god of war, or as a time traveler who would encounter all sorts of strange worlds out there ruled by laws not entirely akin to our own, the neuronet had to build a body for you that’s more akin to a shapeshifter. Like that chick in X-Men.”
“How would that be possible?”
Hatter shrugged. “Each cell in your body has countless moving parts. The neuronet would have had to extend tendrils through you fine enough to wrap around each moving part, in a sense contain it within its own Schrodinger’s box, allowing the cat to be both alive and dead inside. Until the lid on the box is opened. In other words, your body avoids morphing in this timeline or in any timeline into whatever new form it needs to be from one nanosecond to the next until sufficiently stressed. And if not stressed, then it just reprints itself as it was before in keeping with your consciousness holding you to this timeline.”
“You just stressed the hell out of me, doc. Why don’t I look like a Promethean lizard, then?”
“The physical habitat you’re returning to hasn’t changed. If it had, you very well might look like that.”
Roman hopped out of the chair.
“Thank God,” Hatter’s other patient said, jumping back into the chair. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind, doc? I’m feeling a bit exposed here.”
“Yeah, yeah,” both Hatter and Roman said, still sounding preoccupied.
“So what you’re saying is I really am a god of war. That’s not just a spicy metaphor.”
Hatter grimaced. “If I remember my mythology, even gods can be brought down. Too little is known about the quantum realm. And if Sabrina is half as good as people say she is, she would have anticipated this possibility. So even if the quantum realm isn’t her specialty, you can bet she’s figured out some ways of neutralizing you at that level.”
Roman squeezed the back of his neck, the muscles in that region tensing up. “It does make you wonder though, if DARPA even suspects the truth about me, why there aren’t more neuronet people walking about.”
“You’re joking, right? They’re probably waiting to find out if the rumors about you are accurate. They’ll see what the Magnificent Seven digs up on you. If the rumors are right, they’ll likely destroy any evidence of the project having ever taken place, and any remaining prototypes. Leave it to the girls to do mop up. Nobody wants that kind of power in the hands of one person. Nobody.”
Roman grimaced. Hatter was better at finding his pain points than those of his patient. “As usual, you’re worth your weight in gold. Thanks Hatter.”
Roman was running off when Hatter shouted after him to stop. “One more thing, Roman. It’s highly possible the more you fire up that quantum brain of yours the more you’re like these pawns. Your biological brain exposed to those kinds of quantum flux levels... You could go mad. It may be precisely how the others before you went mad.”
Roman swallowed hard. “Got you.”
“If so, there’s no coming back to Elsa, even if you manage to save her.”
He imagined Hatter threw in that last remark to give him a bit more pause. He was a good friend.
TWENTY-TWO
Ethan winced as he sat up from the operating table and pressed against his abdomen. “I guess my stomach was the most logical place to situate yourself,” he said to Alexa. “But I’m going to miss my big spaghetti dinners now that you’re occupying a good chunk of my stomach’s real-estate.”
He finished scooting off the table and limped towards the door, trying his best to ignore the robots ambulating far better than he was. “I’ll try and overlook the irony for now that it was us humans that taught you to walk.”
“Alexa, you there? Why aren’t you responding?”
“Sorry, didn’t know tuning in your inane prattle was part of the deal.”
Her voice was coming in loud and clear inside his head as if he were listening in to his mindchip placing a wireless call on his behalf. Ethan grimaced at her acerbic remark.
He made it out of the surgical theater where corporate execs were upgraded for a pretty penny to help them carry out whatever arcane function they specialized in as a cog within the wheel of a giant conglomerate. He was in the hall now, looking for the closest exit. “How are you going to run a global media empire from inside my stomach? Back in the basement you had fiber-optic connections to everything. Guess I should have asked this question before the surgery.”
“Orion, a member of the Daytona collective, figured out how to pulse information by way of self-initiating and self-dissolving wormholes, without giving away the sender’s position. Entirely unhackable, no amount of time and space any kind of obstacle.”
Ethan grunted. “That’s Orion for you. Mind telling me how you knew that?”
“One of my corollary functions as a media empire mogul is to be able to get inside everyone’s heads better than they can so I know how best to market to them. Prior generations of AI had little other choice but to monitor internet activity, credit card purchases, and TV viewing, to profile their customers. With my kind of mind power it’s rather easy to get inside their heads, literally.”
He noticed he was walking better and wincing less. His mindchip and nano swarms must have been healing him postoperatively, accelerating his recovery response. Seconds later, he was outside the building and hopping into a taxi.
“Where to?” the driver said.
“Just drive around. Now that I’m master of the universe, I’d kind of like to see what my domain entails exactly.”
“Christ, another loon. The third one today. Let me see the cash.”
Ethan held up a roll of bills. The big round eyes on the Tex-Mex gene mix of a taxi driver got bigger and rounder.
“Fine, be as
crazy as you want,” the driver said, putting the car in gear and driving off.
Ethan resumed his conversation, talking aloud, though he knew he technically didn’t have to. Somehow verbalizing made him feel less alone. “Walk me through how you get inside people’s heads.”
The driver, convinced he was talking to himself, after checking him in the rearview mirror, just stuck in his earphones and turned up the volume on his iPod to tune him out.
“I infiltrated all of the plants synthesizing the chemicals for government cloud-seeding operations. Controlling the weather being a prelude to weather wars. And temporarily overrode their agenda with my own. Once my nanobots were dispersed throughout the atmosphere, they had what they needed to self-replicate and seek out their human hosts. Once inside those hosts…”
“Wait, people just inhaled these things?”
“Possibly, but they didn’t have to. The nanobots can tunnel in through the skin, the air canal, any part of your body they land on. They’re too small to be detected by the human nervous system. Once inside you, they migrate to the brain, continue their replication until they’ve formed a neuronet, like another membrane around your grey matter.”
“Holy shit!” Ethan ran his hand over his head, back and forth, making a mess of his hair but forcing more blood to his brain by irritating the shit out of his scalp. He needed all the blood going there he could get right now. Forgetting for a moment that he had access to all the mind power he needed. His gasping was subsiding and his breathing coming under control again, partly. “I thought Roman was the first and only neuronet man.”
“By any definition of the word, he is. My neuronets are strictly there for surveillance and monitoring so I can better understand my customers.”
“But you could rewrite the nanobot hive mind arrays of those nets, both the software and the self-evolving hardware to do much more?”
“Yes, I could.”
Ethan tapped his knuckle against the window, to help him think, still resorting to old tricks that made little sense with a DNA-supercomputer in his stomach. But that was her brain, and he needed greater access to his right now. “Can you tweak the neuronets so the human hosts have visions of a better, more egalitarian future, along the lines of what Roman is imagining? Using what you know about your customer base, and the kind of rhetoric that would work best on them?”
Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents Page 20