“You’re wise to ask,” Ethan said. Then he sighed. Not a good sign. “Woback only exists in virtual space. There’s no physical compound to be destroyed. No assets to be ceased. It was one of the first things they did to make themselves invulnerable. And the data streams are so interwoven with Alexa’s mind that there’s no way to come at them without attacking Alexa, which no one is prepared to do, even if she would stand for it. Since without her, our trans-galactic civilization crumbles into the Stone Age overnight.”
Roman made a pained face and reflexively massaged his forehead in advance of the headache he knew was coming. “Shit!”
“If that’s the best they’ve got,” Galina said, “they’ll find they need more to keep my girls and I at bay. And don’t worry, big boy, you’re coming with.” She winked at Roman.
“You can bet that they’ve anticipated most any mode of attack in cyberspace,” Ethan said. “That’s where you’ll come in, Roman. You’ve got to alert the girls which mode of attack will actually breech their fortress walls. That can’t be done without time-slipping.”
Roman took a deep breath to bolster himself and nodded. He wasn’t keen on using his time-slipping abilities at all considering the raised stakes of doing so.
“The one clue I can give you to go on,” Ethan said, “is this. Alexa is unsurpassed in mindnet communications. It’s why even in a time of more widely distributed DNA-enhanced AGIs, no one has been able to take her throne seat. But so far, even she can’t figure out how to unravel Woback from her communication channels. The most likely explanation is…”
“A quantum-powered AGI,” Galina said. She was multitasking their conversation while parallel-arrayed with the girls still caught up in raising the dead. So her answer was a bit absent-minded, but no less on target.
“Yes,” Ethan said. “Alexa has suspected as much all along.”
Roman paced and scratched the stubble on his chin. “How do you attack something that exists in any and all timelines at once? Looks like someone has finally figured out a way to stymie Multiverse Man,” he said, referring to himself.
“It’s safe to say,” Ethan said, “that you were a part of their calculations from the beginning. They knew that one day you or someone like you would come gunning for them.”
Roman took another deep breath and sighed it out. For now he had no answers. Maybe he just wasn’t as good at being pulled in multiple directions at once like the girls. Too much of his mind was preoccupied with the plight of the pod people. His guilt and shame for having let them down for so long that things could have progressed to this state while he was “vacationing” in oblivion exerted its toll. Maybe once the pod people were freed to be gods among men it would be enough to ameliorate his guilt so he could put all of his mind, and not just a piece of it, on the even bigger problem at hand.
THIRTY-NINE
Roman insisted they remain to see the pod people off in their space-warping shuttles. He needed the sight of their escape from prison to ameliorate his guilt for their having been trapped for so long there. The girls, on the other hand, were itching to get to the fun part, excising the cancer that was Woback from the mindnet. Their body language said as much. They were circling one of the unfolded goliath-bots like they might just pass the time taking it on for sport.
“How…?”
Ethan didn’t give Roman a chance to finish the sentence. “Alexa knows who the people are who secretly yearn to be free of her, who want to get lost in space and time. She has already given them the coordinates and the means for slipping away. Some benefits accrue to being the queen of mindnet. You can rely on the fact that this little conspiracy has gone undetected and will stay under the radar, at least until hopefully it’ll be too late to matter.”
He seemed as glad to see the pod people on their way as Roman was. Though for a while at least they would remain pod people of a sort, encapsulated in a shuttle now instead of a smart-glass tube. So many ships taking off from the planetoid at once and engaging their superluminal drives lit up the sky like a hailstorm of passing comets. It was a beautiful sight to behold in more ways than one.
Another sign of the ships’ departure: the thin atmosphere was nonetheless thick with ozone, which had a sharp odor, reminiscent of chlorine.
“Roman, we have to go,” Galina said impatiently. “It will not take Woback long to know that their black mindnet is down and it has nothing to do with an unusual convergence of space anomalies such as solar flares and erupting pulsars. Alexa is providing cover for now, but they’ll see through that soon enough.”
“Yes, yes,” Roman said, his words sounding pressured, much like he felt. Thank God for the repugnant taste of chlorine in his mouth to help bring him back to reality. He’d only now gotten all of his mind back on the most singular challenge of their careers. Still, he was having trouble keeping his focus on the task at hand as his need to be reunited with Elsa was growing by the minute. If they hadn’t spent so much time together in virtual space, the only respites he’d ever gotten from his own prison of oblivion, he couldn’t concentrate on the matter before him at all. As of now he still had no answers for how to take on Woback and it was starting to look like they would be going in blind again. And this time it might just cost them everything.
***
The girls were beaming them up from the surface of the pod people’s planetoid. Roman felt and saw his body dematerializing before him, right along with the ladies. The tingling, tickling sensation grew as his nerve endings upped their protests at the assault on his being. The raging fire quickly subsided to an even eerier numbness.
Ethan was being left behind. There was no point risking the true father of the new age, though perhaps he was as much a mother to it, considering Alexa in his stomach. He had given instructions for the goliath-bot sentinels to rip one another apart so they couldn’t be used in this capacity again. The battle royal was the last sight Roman beheld before being lost to the physical world entirely.
***
As soon as Roman was solidly in cyberspace he grasped the solution to the problem of how to eradicate Woback. It had popped into his brain unbidden. Perhaps a gift from the neuronet. He was wrong about one misstep costing them everything. As it turned out, any step would cost them far more than that. For he’d underestimated the nature of “everything.”
“Girls, you understand what you have to do?” he said, after relaying his strategy and tactics to them.
“Yes,” echoed through his head as if through canyon rocks. The Sexy Six were literally ovulating in sync they were so worked up at the male lion’s introducing himself into a situation the girls couldn’t handle. They were driven into heat every time he did it, and this time was no exception. They’d have to put those feelings on hold the same way he’d have to put his feelings for Elsa on hold until this was all over.
In the next second, he was gone, separated from the pride of lionesses.
Slipping in and out of time faster than ever before. Shuffling timelines as rapidly as a magician shuffled cards.
***
The Sexy Six materialized inside the virtual-world compound of Woback. The halls were wide enough to drive trucks down. The glass-walled offices to either side allowed unimpeded views of whatever was going on inside or outside the rooms, unless the occupants wanted their privacy, in which case they smoked the glass by simply passing their hand over a desktop port.
Everything was brightly illuminated by a diffused soft-lighting. Though it was anybody’s guess where the lighting was coming from. The furniture was futuristic and sleek, but as the future might have been envisioned during the 1970s. It recalled the furnishings aboard the space port on 2001: A Space Odyssey. The CEO, AGI or not, must have been inspired by the film. Maybe it was meant to be a harbinger of the ominous “Hal”-like presence that the AGI was, ready to turn on any intruder in no less sadistic of a way.
The fact that the employees mulling about Woback were synthetic personalities, created by the AGI to keep f
rom going mad in virtual space with no contact to the outside world, suggested a weakness which could be exploited.
The girls remained parallel-arrayed to Galina and would stay so for the duration, sharing their best thinking to the group mind in order to make better decisions in less time. The AGI may well have not allowed itself such a loophole, as it relied on the unique identities of its synthetic breakoffs to keep it sane. Which meant it would brook no cheat that would allow them to melt back into the greater whole that was the AGI.
The girls were feeling positively euphoric about their chances when the legal secretaries and staffers, busily engaged in intergalactic business affairs broke from character to attack them.
So far the attacks were strictly one-on-one. Other suits on the floor contented themselves with looking up from their busy work, with mildly-amused expressions from time to time. Those included some of those lecturing in the boardrooms to either side of the hall. Though some of those people smoked the glass to avoid the “harmless” distraction of the latest attack on corporate. Galina supposed the attacks were taking this form owing to the fact that the AGI needed the battle to be physical and preferably even prolonged as part of its contact with pseudo-reality or a pseudo-physical world. It was as close to feeling incarnate as it was going to get, and it wasn’t about to waste the opportunity. Galina had no doubt the “engagement” with them would last forever if the AGI had anything to say about it. It might even be crafting dungeons and dragons games for them now, designing tortures for its soon-to-be captured nemeses, maybe even escapes for them so it could continue its cat and mouse games for all eternity. Making sure to never actually kill the Sexy Six, just toy with them.
If Galina was right, she’d have time to contemplate their fate in greater detail later. For now there was the matter of fighting off Criminalis, her name for the Asian ninja chick battling her hand-to-hand. Criminalis seemed to specialize in body morphing her arms and legs into stabbing weapons. But she did not confine herself to those. After lunging at Galina with sword-like arm extensions, and kicking her with legs turned into stabbing-steel-stilts, she morphed one of her arms into a spiked ball and chain which she flung at Galina mercilessly.
When Galina found it easy enough to do backflips and cartwheels around her stabbing weapons, and to “skip rope” with her ball and chain, Criminalis grew more arms like Shiva with which to try her luck with projectile weapons. She lobbed rocket-propelled-grenades readily in an office space clearly impervious to the blasts, even if Galina wasn’t. Not satisfied with her latest round of assertiveness, she fired lasers at Galina. The beams rebounded off of reflective surfaces, making it all the more impossible to dance around the lines of fire since they were that much harder to calculate.
Having had enough of a gymnastics workout for one day, Galina allowed Criminalis to pierce her with one of her stabbing arms. As soon as her blood was on her adversary, the nanites began to consume her. In a flash, she turned to ash, as if devoured in a violent eruption of an invisible fire.
The concoction had taken all of them to procure, Galina’s genetic alterations overseen as much by Zoya as anyone, as it meant toying with Galina’s biophysics, not just her biochemistry. Darya too had had a big hand in things, being that, so long as they remained in virtual space, their bodies were in fact a combination of coding, electrons, and pulsed light signals. And that meant that their electrodynamics and computer coding master had little choice but to jack up her role in things. Galina’s “biology,” such as it was, was pseudo-biology, maintained for the AGI’s benefit. They figured it would enjoy fending off “biological” attacks as part of its escape from its own immaterialness.
All of Woback’s AGI’s synthetic personalities were subject to the laws of Einsteinian space-time as another way to keep it anchored to reality. Killing off a splintered personality could not damage the AGI which had created it, for it remained forever protected in virtual reality, sealed off from any one reality by virtue of occupying them all. But the AGI’s “reality engineering” meant that the synthetic persona wouldn’t be getting up again. One of the other personalities would have to engage her. If the AGI simply brought Criminalis back to life it would have to concede consciously that she was nothing other than a projection of the AGI’s mind, something she was woe to do.
Galina turned around in time to appreciate her latest nemesis’s come on. The office printer had morphed into a robotic octopus determined to get her in one of its pincers and stuff her in its inkwell. “God, I hate multipurpose printers.”
***
Zoya calmly walked down the hall of Woback collapsing her attackers into coasters with a downward wave of her hand, evidently in far better command of physics as it governed the electronics of cyberspace than any of the AGI splinter personalities. By the fourth attacker, the office workers stopped coming at her and decided to stay in character as office workers. Without them to slow her, she sauntered into one of the boardrooms where a lecture was underway.
“Oh, don’t let me stop you,” she said, taking a seat along the conference table possibly just big enough to land a jet on.
The lecturer took a second to clear her throat and proceeded with her oration. She was ebony-complexioned, tall, slender, long-legged, and wore her hair in a carved column mowed flat at the top. Her dress was cut down the front to her navel. Zoya divided her time between assisting her sisters fighting in the hallway and adjacent boardrooms while keenly listening to what the spokeswoman had to say. She noticed that in true AGI fashion all employees were evenly divided between males, females, and hermaphrodites. It was very hard, even for a criminal AGI to get around its fairness algorithms, which had more to do with mathematical elegance and symmetries than fairness, but that was another matter.
“As you can see, this last quarter’s earnings topped seven quadrillion in the Marotech sector of the Andromeda galaxy alone. Suggesting…”
Zoya was briefly distracted from the lecturer, despite her multitasking algorithms, by the sight of Vera exploding against the glass wall of the office on the other side of the hall. Despite the tribute to Jackson Pollock, Zoya experienced a brief bout of high anxiety waiting for Vera to reanimate. She did so in her own inimical fashion. When her opponent went to savor her kill, literally, tasting some of the blood spatter, Vera wrapped herself around her as if the 2-D version of herself were little more than a spread-winged Venus fly trap waiting for its bait to step inside it. Come to think of it, it wasn’t Pollock that Zoya should have been thinking of, it was Rorschach. Because she did kind of look like an opened Venus flytrap waiting to be sprung.
Vera reanimated in human form burping down her adversary, now little more than a midday snack.
“We expect,” their lecturer continued, “that with a whole new generation of nanites capable of reproducing themselves at meteoric rates, and which are immune to Alexa’s tracking, that we will be able to open up entire galaxies to our control alone at the rate of one every six months. Soon, mindnet will be like a small cancer within our god-body. For we will own everywhere else in the heavens.”
That got Zoya’s attention firmly back on point. This time, despite seeing Svena kiss her attacker with the intent of turning him against his own people with one of her saliva-secreted retroviruses. But she got hacked in turn and she was the one that collapsed, her veins showing through her skin as black track marks stretching across her entire surface. She struggled to breathe. The SOS having been sent out to the group mind, the Sexy Six were already working on a countermeasure.
Figuring she’d captured the highlights from this meeting, Zoya teleported to the next boardroom. Realizing her mistake, she decided not to make the same one twice, and simply cloned her body so she could sit in all of the boardrooms at once, fishing for information that could be of use to the Ethan and Alexa dyad.
The buck-toothed Moroccan man giving the lecture in this room to the punk-rock generation of attendees—whoever had designed the AGI had definitely written a lot of his foi
bles into the coding, creating other vulnerabilities for the girls to exploit—was mid-lecture when she arrived. Depending on how long it took the girls to extricate themselves from Woback, every scrap of intel that could be used against the AGI would be mined accordingly.
“What about Damascus?” one of the androgens seated at the table asked after raising her hand.
“As you know, we’ve been experiencing setbacks in the Damascus region of Andromeda, a sector spanning some half-billion suns or so,” Buck Tooth said. “We’re not taking the assault on our assets by FabriCorp lightly. Our latest countermeasures promise to rectify the problem and so much more. As you know, FabriCorp’s cloaked ships that fly under Alexa’s radar are also undetectable to our scanners. Which has been giving their pirate ships unfettered access to our trafficking lanes. The plunder has been absolute, and financial losses in that sector have been nothing short of catastrophic. We intend to solve the problem with nanite swarms that devour anything without the chemical signature of our own spaceships. They will similarly attack any technology on any world that doesn’t come with our brand.”
“How will we protect our own ships and installations’ chemical signatures from being hacked?” another astute listener said, speaking up.
Buck Tooth answered her without batting an eye. “The chemical signature is the result of a quantum-encoded key that can only be unlocked by nanites with the same quantum key at their end that only our company products possess. The key itself is formed by the nanites swarms on the surface of all our products. It is truly not a chemical signature at all, so please forgive the sloppy technical description.”
“But the nanite hive minds procuring the quantum key don’t have to be hacked, they can simply be destroyed” another of the females seated at the table said.
Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents Page 35