Copy Me: & Other Science Fiction Stories

by Laston Kirkland

  He had been on the best high he had ever had. It was epic. He walked the world like a god. Every man envied him; every woman wanted him. He could do anything. It was all so easy. He knew he didn’t have much time left before the high vanished, and the low set in. He’d be crying and rocking in a heap for a couple days, and then refuse to leave his bed for a week. His profile would notice sooner rather than later, and then he’d be back on the pump. Now or never. Pay the price.

  “Select Vehicular Controls.”

  He held his breath when he punched the button, expecting it all to happen right then. The car stayed rock steady, but with a click and a whirr something popped out of his dashboard very much like the gamepad he used on his entertainment wall at home. He exhaled slowly. Okay, so that’s how to do it. He looked at it. Pretty easy, he thought. Push forward to go faster; pull backward to slow down or reverse; tilt to turn. Nothing to it. The buttons were probably important; but he didn’t think he’d need them.

  He knew that people used these all the time back in the day. They’d evolved from mechanical linkages that were, by some clever engineering, directly attached to the engine and wheels. He remembered all of that had made the cars fantastically expensive, too. Not like today where everyone had a service agreement, and a branded car would appear when you needed it.

  Holding the car’s manual controls he realized his seat wasn’t right. He used his voice command: “Seat up. More. More. Stop. Seat tilt. Back. Back. Stop!” He put the seat right in the middle, so he could see out of every window. It seemed like the right way to do it. There. He was ready. He glanced at the paper again.

  “From same menu, access Manual Override.”

  Manual Override. This was it. He’d only have a few seconds before a police monitor found a higher security profile. But John had fairly high clearance from his job. This was it. His moment of glory.

  He touched the menu.

  The car lurched and shuddered. John needed to steady the control pad. It didn’t take long to get in full control, It was easier than he thought. The controls were a dream. At that same moment, all the cars around him swerved away, quite a distance away. He was now the only vehicle in the center of a large empty bubble, all other vehicles at least five meters distant. The traffic was still bumper to bumper inches away from each other, but his car was alone.

  He hadn’t expected that. He swerved as hard as he could to the right, his car’s gyroscopic commands preventing him from flipping the car, but his reactions were no match against the other vehicles’ automatic controls. They all swerved in unison, staying on all sides of him exactly the same five meter distance. He came nowhere near to hitting them.

  The privacy window went off from the couple, holding their clothing in modesty. They were watching his car in astonishment. He tried again, the couple realized what he was doing, and fear filled their faces. But then they grinned when they saw that John couldn’t get any closer to them. The girl gave him the finger.

  In a wordless cry of frustration John twisted the control as hard as he could the other direction. His gyroscopic systems easily kept all four wheels on the ground but wrenched him hard against the inside of his door. But he couldn’t hit anything! The car with the kids in it was still behind him. All five had their faces pressed against the glass. Fine. Them.

  John pulled as much as he could on his control pad, and his car stopped as hard as it would let him. Automatic systems took over the manual and slowed him safely down to a complete stop in fractional seconds. They worked so well, there weren’t even any marks on the road.

  The vehicle with the kids easily swerved around him and all the children rushed to the back window to watch him as traffic carried them away. Those cars were sorting themselves back to normality before he was fully out of sight. The few cars that formed the bubble directly around him, calculated his distance and trajectories, making vector changes on the fly to avoid anything he tried. They didn’t even slow down.

  John was wordlessly screaming while speeding the wrong way on a ten lane highway. It was like an invisible wedge was in front of him, creating a wake that no matter how hard he tried he could get not get close to anything. He accelerated to the highest speed his car could go, an impressive 260km/hr, but nothing was working. Nothing he did could get him close enough to catch up with anyone.

  John realized that each car was making micro-adjustments to their course so far in advance that John would never, COULD never, get close enough. He realized that the closest this would ever come to making the news would probably be that girl’s online diary.

  He knew his time was almost up. Somewhere a police monitor was flashing a warning siren, demanding a human with a higher profile give it the okay to override John’s override. He spotted a bridge. Accelerating as fast as he could he aimed directly for a support pylon. “That’s not going to dodge!” he screamed out loud as he sped towards it.

  But then, his vehicle slowed “No! No! No! Noooooo!” John now shouting. He’d forgotten to stay silent and started sobbing as his control pad lost all response. His car turned itself around and headed for the off ramp. He heard the doors lock. He’d been overridden! They had probably been taking their time, not knowing what he planned—until he shouted.

  He kicked the dash over and over, and slammed his hands against the windows. He rolled out of his seat, and lay on his back, pounding the floor with hands and feet.

  The cars around him had returned to being inches away, but the police had triggered the privacy settings. No one could see inside had they bothered to look up.

  John knew they would make him go on the pill pump again and, this time, put it somewhere deeper and harder to reach. He wished he had thought to bring the pliers with him. Maybe he could figure out a way to kill himself before his car reached the police station. He stared at the roof as tears ran down his face.

  He pounded the floor again in helpless fury.

  Damned car wouldn’t let him die.

  •

  Copy Me

  It started as a joke.

  We did not know it would come to this. We suspected, of course. And we planned for it. It’s what we do. But, really, trust me, it started as a joke.

  They jammed wireless an hour ago. But we had shifted our spectrum over to both a visible light band and a low level ELF band. We adapted bluetooth to the new spread. It would be Illegal if they knew we could do that, but first they would have to make a law against it. Ha!

  We made absolutely sure we did not interfere with any controlled spectrum, and, man, the thing signal hops so fast it’s practically undetectable! We only noticed the jamming because an app told us about it. The ELF, of course, is only good for text and low res. And, true, it’s slow, but the thing is that it works for miles.

  They already dropped paint on the solar panels on the roof. The backup batteries are fine, but we shut off the exterior lights so they would think that they actually did something. Information wants to be free, but it’s only a little wrong to delay it for a few hours, right? Let them tell the world what they wish, then prove them liars. A bank of heavy high speed flywheels, encased in concrete, will keep our power on for at least a week.

  Like I say, we had no idea it would come to this. But none of us are sorry it happened. I doubt if we went back in time any of us would opt out. We might have avoided a couple of issues, prepared better for a couple more. Some of us would have liked to avoid this particular point in time. But we’d do it again. I’d like to think all of us would.

  I would.

  Police scanners told us they planned to “light it up,” that is, shoot tear gas rounds that are known to catch things on fire. They still think the compound is full, over a hundred people inside including the children. They intend to burn us alive. Calling us a cult. Calling us terrorists.

  We planned for that. We put sound-activated Halon gas canisters in the trees (can’t jam a 2600
frequency modulated sound, at least not easily, not without special equipment.) And we put them in the upper walls of the compound. We have scuba tanks and masks. Of course, we also have tunnels.

  We dug down and over to a water main, hollowed a space under it, then tunneled beneath the pipe a few miles to a safe-house. A garage. Can’t detect that with sound imagers with the pipe in the way. Ha!

  We firmed the tunnel up with printed cement columns, we didn’t want it collapsing anyone’s water supply. Honestly, we knew someday we’d have to use this. We plan. It’s what we do. We even repaired a few rust spots and leaks while we were in there.

  I know this building won’t burn. That will buy us a few hours. They won’t be able to “accidentally” kill us. We intend to record every attempt, streaming the whole thing to several locations, but delaying release. We want it all on record. Information wants to be free. We may die, but we are winning.

  It’s interesting, but not surprising, that there is no mainstream news coverage. All the social sites are streaming it live. The independent ones. We knew this would not be televised, at least since 1970 when Scott Heron made that clear with congas and bongo drums. It will be texted, tweeted, beamed, and blogged.

  We are techies, white hats, phreaks and social manipulators. We weren’t script kiddies, using other people’s code to “hack stuff.” We were the ones that wrote the codes. Not one of us called ourselves “leet.” We were idealists and true believers, regularly employed, creative types, coders.

  A lot of us were tech workers watching people profit from our work. The oldest of us were the Hippies who wanted to change the world, and failed over and over, The Suits converting our dreams of world peace and plenty into realities of leverage and rent seeking. We were using what we built for everyone. But The Suits changed it. They denied those who could not afford the monthly service plan. We didn’t really blame them. They gave us money, we gave them stuff. They used our stuff to make more money. That’s how it worked. We understood that.

  We didn’t understand then that there was a better way.

  In the beginning, we heard of this new joke religion: “Copy me.” We’d been involved in a lot of online stuff, and we thought it was hilarious. “Information wants to be free!” “Intellectual property is a ridiculous myth, you can’t own a thought, a sound, or an image!” “It is our sacred duty to uncover secrets and expose them!” The new religion was obviously a joke. Who could take that seriously?

  Well, that’s what we thought, back then.

  This Copymism stuff sounded like a great way to tweak the noses of the establishment. Twenty of us got together online and formed a chapter, laughing and joking the whole time. We wrote up some guidelines and a few sacraments. Made up ten commandments, and polished up a few rituals. We kept the whole thing little more than tongue in cheek, tweaking it to look dignified and serious, saying things like, “No one should be allowed to hoard information, to hide knowledge, or anything like that!” “If I can get a thing without taking yours away, you only lose YOUR control over MY use of it. Nothing wrong with that!” Right?

  We borrowed from the Church of the Subgenius, and Jedi, and Flying Spaghetti Monster, and the Cult of Scott Bakula. We were planning on making this a way to get drunk, hit on girls, and copy movies. We honestly weren’t expecting anyone to take us seriously. None of us were pious. None of us believed in a higher power or, well, anything really. Agnostics and atheists, hedonists, technologists, and nerds.

  The hour we launched the website, we had a thousand hits. It had been grabbed instantly by six or seven major social media sites. By the end of the week, six million people had visited it.

  Over a hundred people joined in the first day. We sat and joked about advertising and money.

  We didn’t know yet what we had done.

  Now they’ve fired burners. Lots of smoke and chaos in the above-ground complex. I’m in a sub basement with plant fiber and basalt re-bar reinforced concrete. Most of the congregation has been evacuated. The rest are with me. All confirmed safe, most are two miles away, in a garage with three school buses we bought used, and repainted. Waiting for two-thirty to join the hundreds of buses that will be on the street at the same time.

  Down to five of us. I’ve triggered the halon and I’m watching the fires go out. The sound of the halon klaxon scared the people who had begun to creep up on the complex. They evacuated as soon as they heard it. Good thing I was monitoring them to make sure not to trigger any halon near where they could get hurt. It will suck the air right out of your lungs if you aren’t careful. We rigged multipoint UV sensors up all over. The smoke isn’t obscuring a thing. Ha!

  They will probably wait a bit before the next attempt. I also have a camera watching them from a tree on a nearby hill, a buried fiber keeping us informed. Looks as though they will send in armored vehicles next to smash down the forest and compound walls. We planned for that as well. Amazing what a robot mounted with an eleven-axis router and a cement printer can make. This complex has six of them. I built one myself. Very spiritually fulfilling.

  The compound is surrounded by a twelve-meter wide, six-meter deep, sand moat. We use it as a Zen garden, a boundary zone, and for heat absorption in temperature differential passive cooling. The bottom of the sand moat is rigged with pneumatic pipes that can pump out pressure for twenty minutes. It will turn the whole strip into something like super fast quicksand when it’s turned on. It shouldn’t hurt anyone, but they will have to dig their vehicle out with a backhoe. Ha!

  On one side of the sand we had our solar heliostat collectors and focusing mirrors, our glass lenses and tiny motors, satellite relays and microwave repeaters. A thousand communication sensors for the backbone connection. We needed the clear field on both sides of the glass wall to receive full signal. Repairing that is my favorite meditation exercise.

  On the other side of the sand was the start of our food forest, a thick hedge of bamboo, running ten feet deep and thirty feet tall, which we had bred and modified. Nut trees forming a second wall behind them, accelerated growth, but still none of them with a trunk thicker than a man’s arm. Then fruit trees. Then hedges. Then tall plants and short plants, all carefully arranged. Tended lovingly, every plant studied for its placement and interaction with the others.

  The bamboo is thick and strong. We harvest it regularly, leaving the roots. It will take a bulldozer or tank to get through it. Slowly. Too bad the nut trees aren’t mature. Then, even a bulldozer would not be enough. Once past that of course our walls are made of four foot thick mud, bamboo, and straw. The bulldozers won’t work on that, but it will blow through the compound door like it was paper. We planned for that as well, so they don’t hurt our building, we can regrow the bamboo easier than rebuild our monastery.

  So there we were, five of us, meeting in person for the first time, although we’d known each other for years. A lot more of us were talking together online, having video chats and texting. We were all just sitting around and celebrating the launch of our Copyme Manifesto, finding the whole thing hilarious, when we heard a knock on our door.

  I admit that we panicked a bit back then. Someone had puzzled out our location? We thought we were well hidden. We were wrong. Five guys in suits and ties. Very serious. Very driven. Very polite. Each one of them intense.

  They explained they were part of a larger group.

  They talked about crazy stuff. We recorded it all in a dozen formats. Singularity was mentioned a lot, and I wasn’t impressed, then. Eden Projects, Twenty Forty-Five, immortality and transhumanity. Nineteen Eighty-Four, Transparent Society and Godel Escher Bach, L-4, One Way to Mars, Post-Scarcity, Peak Oil, the long boom, the long tail, peak child, anarchy and collapse. Everything spoken with intensity, with fervor and with obsession. We hadn’t heard of half these things before.

  They had been monitoring all this stuff, believing in the causes a little, or at least in the progress
ive technology, but not so much the utopian or dystopian inferences, and they said they were the only ones who realized what was happening. These five intense guys in suits had an explanation. Traditional social contracts were breaking down. People’s hopes, dreams, and allegiances were being transferred to things other than nation, location, race, or religion.

  They told us this transfer of allegiance had no guidelines, it was being controlled indirectly and accidentally by money and power, mostly to create more money and power. Empty, shallow senses of identities. Not a lot of real satisfaction in an allegiance to a brand name. Our visitors wanted to harness all of that dissatisfaction. Give them a real cause to get behind. Build something different. Something lasting, and better. They needed a vehicle for their plan. Our Copymism was perfect.

  Movements were springing up, reaching a near critical mass, then falling apart again and again. Our visitors were part of a lot of those. The Green Movement, Anonymous, Tea Party, Occupy, Pirate Party. These intense visitors were there, in the front lines, leading, following, but mostly learning what worked, and what went wrong.

  They explained that ever since that science fiction guy did it, they knew creating this was possible, but they wanted to make one that wasn’t full of garbage, full of power plays, or egos. They wanted to make something from whole cloth. Something useful, inclusive, intelligent. They wanted to create a way to unify the world, they said, without controlling it. A religion with lots of spirituality, but without an actual deity. Ceremony, but extremely limited hierarchy. A religion of equals whose goal was improvement. Worship organized for iterative advancement. They stated in dead seriousness that if they did it right, very few would ever know they existed. It would just happen.

  The Acolytes (as we started to call them) had been preparing for a spark to ignite another movement like so many others they had tracked. A meme they could shape. Our Copymism was perfect. Some of their number were techies like us, but some were historians, philosophers, religious scholars, behavioral scientists, economists, sociologists, and even a few lawyers. All were disillusioned with the current systems, and wanted a complete change. Some had money. All told there were sixty-four of us in that meeting. Our inner circle. Ten present physically, the rest online.