“Of course.”
“You think you could go so far as to fire them up with a sense of themselves that only comes to fruition by becoming one of these builders of tomorrow? And enhancing their aptitudes, to turn them into the architects, engineers, designers and builders of whatever niche in this more egalitarian universe they seem most suited to?”
“Yes.”
“Just how much of your mind power would this take?”
“Next to none. I wrote the algorithms while you were talking. All that is needed now is to pulse the messages to the neuronets. From there, the neuronets themselves will handle evolving the humans in the direction you desire.”
“Shiiiiiit.” Ethan took another deep breath and held it as he stared into the bright sky, not caring if he blinded himself; he just needed to access total stillness in his mind in a hurry. The ploy worked; he felt calmer, more centered, and more certain. “Do it.”
“Done.”
He chuckled. “Did I just reprogram the entire human race to seek out a more sustainable future without making so much as one TV commercial or publishing out a single blogpost? Which God knows, would only get lost in all the noise out there? You’re right, Alexa, trying to steer the masses in the proper direction using last-gen’s media tech tools would take forever, quadrillions of dollars, and would still likely not entirely take. An insurmountable problem becomes a joke at your level. How did we survive this long without DNA computers?”
“A question not even I can answer.”
Ethan laughed. “Glad to see you’re a bigger smart ass than me. We’re going to get along fine.”
Ethan emptied his mind once more on the sights out the window. Chicago by day was a windy graveyard whose gravestones rose high in the sky and were marked with corporate logos like FARCO, CHIPPIE, and MOONRUSH. “I wonder why Sabrina hasn’t resorted to such tactics. If she wants to play Master of the Universe games, it seems a similar notion would have occurred to her.”
“It’s much harder to steer people in a direction they really don’t want to go. Even if the impulse is coming from within them. Their inner voice would tell them something is wrong. If you continue to push, you’ll end up breaking them. The result would be a schizophrenic, a paranoid, or some other diagnosis from the DSMR-IV.”
Ethan harrumphed.
“You should know that the Daytona collective is working on the same goal as you’ve set for me,” Alexa advised him. “Their idea is to make mindchips cheap enough to get them into people’s heads, and to use more traditional media outlets for convincing people to upgrade.”
“Dead God. What era are they living in? Yeah, let them know we’ve got that problem solved already. Tell them exactly how you’ve already addressed it. No doubt they’ll have additional requests of your DNA-based neuronet, being as it’s infinitely more stable and benign than Roman’s, and anything they request, you have all the mind power they need to undo if they change their mind. Assuming their onboard neuronets won’t be able to handle the reversal quickly enough for their liking. Make sure their requests are granted.”
“Done.”
“How come your neuronets don’t cause the same problems as Roman’s, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Entirely different tech. Far less powerful. With none of the same self-evolving algorithms. No one but the screwy inventor who came up with that thing even begins to understand how it works. And arguably, his understanding is flawed.”
Ethan nodded, his mind drifting off topic as he looked out the window.
“Now, as to Sabrina. Not to be too on the nose, but how do I kill the bitch?”
“It may not be possible.”
“Come again?” Ethan found the ferries taking sightseers up the Chicago River particularly ironic in lieu of how he saw the skyscrapers out his window.
“I’ve been contemplating my own survival in the event of catastrophic loss. DNA-computers need an energy source. Just like the brain you were born with, simple sugars work fine.”
“So we behead her, stick her head in a box, and bury the box a mile or so beneath the earth. I’m thinking she’ll run out of simple sugars long before she comes up with a decent escape plan.”
“That might work, but I gauge the likelihood of success at less than twenty-five percent.”
“Why?”
“A mind that powerful ought to be able to access zero-point energy to sustain itself perpetually.”
“Essentially pulling what energy she needed right out of the quantum void.” Ethan punched the back of the front seat hard as he said, “Fuck me.”
The driver gave him another passing look in the rearview mirror, no doubt assessing anew whether keeping his passenger was worth peeling the hundreds off the roll he’d seen in Ethan’s hand earlier.
“What about sending the head into outer space?” Ethan said. “Let her plot and scheme all she wants from inside her Pandora’s Box. See how many people she affects back here on earth.”
“Time and space are an illusion. Quantum dynamics allow her to affect things in the universe at any distance, and she’ll…”
“…have access to the quantum field. Shit! Shit! Shit! This can’t be happening!” He banged his head this time against the front seat.
The driver who had been throwing him the evil eye in his rearview mirror ever since he mentioned cutting people’s heads off was still deliberating if it was perhaps time to let his passenger out. Ethan did his best to bring himself under control.
Without further cuing, the driver was taking them by the scenic surroundings of the museum, no doubt hoping to calm his passenger down enough to justify ringing up more money on his counter. Pity the Chicago River couldn’t offer up more ferries this time of day, or he might have let his chips ride on the riverside drive.
“What about a good old fashioned shotgun blast to the head?” Ethan prodded Alexa.
Again the driver’s eyes rose to his rearview mirror and his stony-faced expression hardened some more as a measure of just how much he was trying to bottle up his rising concern.
“It stands to reason that if she’s figured out how to access zero point energy,” Alexa replied, “she can create a force field around her head or her entire body for that matter to repel any kind of blast. But in the event her brain was splattered all over the wall, the holographic principle would allow her to regrow herself from any cell in her body.”
“But it would take time. Time I could use to torch the remnants of her mind, so not even a single cell would linger to regenerate itself.”
“The odds of destroying every cell… Still, these are all potential solutions to your problem, though I can’t give you a very high probability for any of them working. It’s possible she hasn’t figured out how to access zero point energy, or come up with effective countermeasures for any of your ploys.”
“Just not likely.” Ethan’s face was red because he was fuming inside; he could see it in the rearview mirror.
“Do you have any ideas that stand a better chance?”
“Even if she can pull off limited quantum-like computing, she’s not a quantum computer. These operations will tax her, take longer than they would for an actual quantum computer, and risk damaging her brain.”
Ethan snorted. “So I have to find a way to overwhelm her. Keeping in mind you just set the stage to evolve the human race by leaps and bounds without using so much as one percent of your mind. Slim hope indeed.”
TWENTY-THREE
By the time Elsa reached the nearest road, she was crawling on her belly, just barely alive. She recalled the fight she had been in with the pawns. Channeling lightning like never before. The stunt hadn’t just messed with her body. It had messed with her mind. She was beginning to wonder if the aftereffects would ever abate.
She saw a car coming her way. Tried to wave. But it was all she could do to lie still on the road. Even holding her head up seemed to be entirely too much.
The car slowed and ultimately stopped in the oppo
site lane. “Taxi?” he said, opening the back door for her to crawl into.
She couldn’t wait to sink into the upholstered leather. She didn’t care what the odds were that such a thing would happen, versus simply being run over by the first driver to come her way.
A semi-truck was headed her direction. She heard the honking of his big-rig horn, the trucker frantic to get both of them out of the way. But she didn’t hear braking. As if the guy was refusing to slow down.
***
“Really?” Preston said, staring down the driver of the big rig.
He held out his hand and, with a pulse of his magnetic field, stopped the truck cold. The driver flew out the front window and landed in front of his taxi, skidding to a stop, out cold. “I swear I put myself to sleep at night counting all the heartless pricks in the world.”
***
Elsa was just happy that, for some mysterious reason, the truck driver had stopped blowing his horn and she could no longer hear his semi approaching. Maybe he’d turned off.
She slipped into the back seat of the taxi the same way she’d made it to the road, crawling on all fours and moaning like a wounded animal with its foot caught in a trap. Laid face down on the backseat as if it were a mattress.
The taxi driver got behind the wheel and aimed the rearview mirror down at her. “Shit!” she said. It was one of the pawns.
“How did…?”
“How did I find you? You were easy enough to track. You do weird things to our magnetic fields.”
“I suppose now you’re going to kill me.”
“Why? You’re one of us. Now that you have your memories back, you should realize that for yourself.”
“Good point.” She managed to flip herself over onto her back. “No torture, even? God, how anticlimactic.”
He smiled impishly at her. “The girls want to tune you up, make you into a goddess of evil.”
“Works for me,” she said sighing. “You look all tuned up yourself in your new duds. Last time I saw you guys you were looking a bit frayed.”
He clenched his jaw to suppress his rising anger, judging by the mask forming on his face and the knotted bulging muscles to either side of his jaw. The remark drew his attention to his face in the rearview mirror. He ran his fingers over his cheek as if looking for a scar as evidence of their recent encounter, but found none. Relaxing, he said, “Yes, I’m feeling far less inclined to kill you now. We pawns are very sensitive about how we look.”
“Keep spare outfits in the trunk, do you?”
“Enough to impress a door-to-door salesman.” He swept his slack jaw from side to side in the rearview mirror checking for errant hairs that might be in-growing or simply not marching in line with all the rest on his day-old stubble. “Though, since our last encounter, I’ve updated to self-healing suits. Just keep the spares in case anything I encounter surpasses even their self-repairing abilities.”
She winced trying to sit up and failing. “It’s important to know what matters the most to you, you know? Me… I like fighting for what I believe in. Got caught up with some pacifists back there. God, it was like getting sucked in by a cult. I was lucky to make it out alive.”
She rolled over on her side and promptly drifted off.
Preston put the car in gear, noticed the trucker in front of the vehicle, showing signs of regaining consciousness, and promptly drove over him.
***
Elsa’s short-circuiting mind couldn’t keep her in the moment, where she lay in back of that moving taxi headed for The Magnificent Seven. So, it took her back to the one place she could never entirely escape. The place of her childhood, and her tyrannical father, laying out edicts for her mother and her, following them up with wife-beatings and belt-lashings for Elsa if either of them came up short. And the whole point was to come up short so he’d have an excuse to vent his anger on them.
***
Elsa was sixteen the day she went into her parents’ bedroom, responding to her mother’s muffled screams. Something was wrong; she could feel it in her gut. Her father was a fan of asphyxiating her mother during sex, so she was used to what those muffled screams sounded like. This one was different.
As she kicked the locked door open, screaming in frustration until the door finally yielded with the fourth kick, there was her mother, dangling, impaled on her father’s cock. He was standing, using the springiness in his legs to bounce her up and down on his member, using one hand to hold the plastic bag over her face, and another hand to fondle her nipples.
Her mother was blue in the face. Elsa took the bat her father kept in the corner of the room for fending off intruders, and swung it at his knee with all the force she could muster.
That got him to release his strangle hold on her mother. He fell to the floor screaming in agony. Elsa ripped the plastic bag off her, and dragged her out of the room, still unconscious. She spent the next few minutes reviving her in the living room with mouth to mouth resuscitation as her father cursed from the bedroom. “I’ll kill you, you bitch! I’ll kill you for this, you worthless whore! You two-day old piece of shite!” He was a drunken Irishman doing his best to hold up the cliché, but for the life of her, she could never get used to hearing “shite!” for “shit!”
His mother was still trying to orient herself to place and time now that she was among the living again when Elsa’s father stormed out of the bedroom holding a noose he’d fashioned. Or perhaps he dug it out of the clothes closet from his bin of sex toys. Tweaked it a bit for his special purposes. He had gone suspiciously quiet towards the end in the bedroom, and now Elsa knew why. He was plotting and setting the stage for his revenge.
He grabbed Elsa by her then long hair, dragged her into his bedroom, shoved the window open, slipped the noose about her neck, and tossed her out the window of their tenth-story flat. So he wouldn’t have to hold her dangling at the end of the line, he looked around for a place to anchor the rope, settled on the foot of the heavy armoire. The weight of her no longer his to carry, he came over to the window and shouted down at her. “We’ll do this every day until you learn to come your panties for me on command. And then we’ll practice the whole asphyxiation thing with you dangling off my dick. Your mother was getting too old and heavy for me, anyway!”
True to his word, his punishment lasted just long enough for her to come on command whenever she was thrown out the window. The noose never snapped her neck, never entirely strangled her. The sex toy had been tweaked to just keep her alive long enough, but suffocating, so she could learn to associate sexual pleasure and release only while being strangled to death.
Elsa had made her peace with the punishment. As it bought her time to get a little sex toy specialty-made from a local S&M boutique in Manhattan, the only city in the world where neighbors could tolerate someone dangling from a rope out a window while her father shouted down from above, “come for me, baby!”
When she’d mastered the art of coming on command, he was ready to ride her himself. By then, she was ready for him.
The moment daddy shoved his dick in her, he knew there was no pulling it out. But his brain couldn’t quite send the signal to the spinal cord reflex fast enough to override it. So pull out his prick he did. The harness lining her vagina, which had a hold of him, had stuck tiny daggers inside his dick along its entire periphery. The needles collapsed with the inward thrust of his cock, so were undetectable, until they folded out when he tried to retrieve his phallus. The instant daddy pulled out, his prick was shredded so badly it was beyond repair.
Elsa watched as he laid on the floor bleeding out, cursing her to high heaven, all the same obscenities he used a hundred times before. When he passed out, she finished cutting off his dick and threw it out the window to a walker-by’s dog. The greyhound promptly gobbled it up.
Then Elsa fastened the noose around his neck and carted him by the feet over to the window. With all her strength, she wrestled his body out until he was the one hanging from the noose of his own design. H
anging dickless.
Cries welled up from the street below. “Bastard finally got what he deserved.” “Good for you, dearie.” “You finally stood up for yourself.”
Her mother was in the living room when this all went down. Elsa walked her over to the window so she could appreciate the hanging art for herself. But she was too far gone. She would never recover from the last beating Elsa’s father gave her. Lived with battery-induced Alzheimer’s, or organic brain syndrome, as the doctors preferred to call it, until she died.
Maybe if the police had had a better response time, so Elsa never dangled out the window on a rope long enough to be properly trained by daddy. Maybe if the neighbors ever had the nerve to file a complaint, or she or her mother was willing to file a complaint, for that matter, daddy would have met with a different fate.
***
Elsa awoke from the heart-warming memory of her father hanging dickless out her parents’ window to find herself staring into Sabrina’s face. She reflexively tried to flee, only to find she’d been strapped down to a dentist’s chair.
“Calm yourself, girl,” Sabrina said. “It took some effort to restore you to one hundred percent, but I assure you, our only desire was to set you right.”
“Then why am I tied down?” she said, continuing to struggle.
“So you wouldn’t hurt yourself during the procedure, of course.” Sabrina undid the restraints for her and Elsa jumped out of the chair. Got as far away from her as she could within the confines of the room.
“What are you going to do with me?”
“Help you reach your potential. You’re a warrior princess, darling, just like us.”
Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents Page 21