Ability (Omnibus)

by Hill, Travis

  Brian rose from his chair and stood in front of Garret, barely able to contain his anger. He was angry that his best friend seemed to be setting rules that hadn’t been agreed upon by anyone but Garret. Brian wasn’t a socialist, or even a hippie who wanted to shower the world with free love, food, and grass. But the thought of profiting from what could change the future of human civilization, maybe even human evolution, incensed him to the point of losing his temper with his best friend. More so because he’d always thought better of Garret. He knew his friend was chafing under the pressures of relying on him for money, food, and dope. He’d tried to let Garret know, as often as possible, that it wasn’t something to worry about. He’d explained to Garret more times than he could remember that friends, brothers even, did for each other without keeping score.

  “As it stands right now,” he said, unable to keep his voice calm, “the only way it works is with both the Receiver and your modules. If you’re going to be a greedy fucking asshole and lecture me about how money is the only thing that will change the world, I’m going to scrap the recipe for Receiver altogether, and you can keep tinkering on your fucking modules for the next decade for all I care.”

  “Bullshit!” Garret yelled, nearly flying out of his chair to stand nose to nose with Brian. He looked wild, full of rage, ready to fight. “You may have your little side job cooking dope for the mafia, but you know it’s only a matter of time before you get nailed for that. There’s no way you will give up the chance to be billionaires, maybe even trillionaires, based on some bullshit principle that money is the root of all evil.”

  “If you think you can cook up a new batch of what we just tripped on, from scratch, then you are more than welcome to be a trillionaire,” Brian said in a low voice. “I have no intention of letting you get rich off of this. You, sitting in your golden fortress somewhere, pulling strings, making money fall from the sky while you’ve bottlenecked limitless knowledge and training behind some kind of fucking paywall.”

  “Oh, here comes the communist manifesto, right? Or is it socialism?” Garret mocked him. “Everyone share the knowledge, build a better world, even figure out how to travel the stars? Expand into the universe, visit other galaxies, discover God’s dimension of existence?”

  “Garret, you are as stupid as you are greedy,” Derry interrupted, rising from the beanbag chair.

  “Fuck you,” Garret said out of the corner of his mouth, not taking his eyes off Brian.

  “No, stupid,” she said. “Fuck you. How much is your money going to be worth in a world where everyone knows how to do everything? So you make a trillion creds, buy your golden fortress and an army, prepare for Armageddon and all that. Whatever. What will your money buy when everyone else can make or do whatever it is that used to require money? When economies collapse because of you two putting this shit out there, whether for free or for pay, what will your money buy?”

  “What do you mean?” Garret asked, finally looking at her and stepping away from Brian. He looked uncertain about where he should direct his rage.

  “Think about it, stupid!” she shouted at him. “A man wants a house built for his family. He learns how, whether he buys your shit or gets it for free, and does it himself, or with help and the promise to do the same for those who helped him. You come along and offer credits to have these guys build you a house, but they are going to laugh at you. They don’t need your worthless credits. They can build a house, and they are busy building houses for each other.”

  “Someone will need the money,” he said, deciding to direct his anger at her. Stupid Dykee, out of her league like always.

  “Sure. And when your mansion is built, and you’ve got all your cars, all your food stored, whatever you want in the world, you think you are going to go spend your money doing philanthropic work all over the globe? Your credits wouldn’t buy you a plane ticket out of the country by then. Africa won’t need you to get them clean water and sanitation facilities built and knock out famine because they’ll all know how to do it. Asia won’t need you to help them create and distribute vaccines and medicines because they’ll already know how to do it. No one will need your money. No one will need you. You’ll have your goddamn mansion or fortress or whatever, and your goddamn fleet of cars and planes and servants and armed guards, but you won’t even have them once they realize your money is worthless.

  “But both of you are even more stupid than I thought. You still haven’t thought this whole thing through. We just talked about economic collapse. Societal collapse even, because suddenly everyone can just do whatever they are able to learn. Who wants to shovel shit in a Mumbai waste plant when they could be a brain surgeon or network operator? Who will advance technology and get it to the masses when there’s no incentive to invest millions of dollars in it, since money will be meaningless within a couple of years?

  “Worse, what about all of the emotionally unstable types? What about criminals, psychotics, all of the kinds of people who should not be able to get their hands on too much knowledge? Do you think you can design modules that deal with thermodynamics, and somehow no one will ever use that knowledge to build a bomb? Build a new kind of bomb with common components that aren’t regulated or restricted? Are you going to police subjects like nuclear physics, gunpowder, shit, even chemistry and math, so people can’t make Ricin powder or Sarin gas and kill mass numbers of people? Are you going to be able to stop a killer from learning all about forensics and crime scenes and detective work and the legal system so he can be a better, more efficient, untraceable killer?

  “What about the madman that learns some biology and discovers an easy way to populate the planet with a virus that eradicates humanity? Or maybe just eradicates everyone that doesn’t have Persian genes. Or English genes. Or whatever race or religion or nutty club they want to save or make extinct? Have you even fucking thought about what might happen should even a fraction of your ‘customers’ gain some kind of ability and do what Brian was able to do?”

  Garret sat down hard on the floor. Brian lowered himself back into his computer chair. Derry was almost foaming at the mouth with anger, though she looked like she was ready to cry instead of attack.

  “What’s wrong?” Brian asked her softly.

  “What’s wrong? I’m hanging out with a couple of fucking morons! A couple of loonies who want to bring about massive social evolution, thinking it will do the world some good, but haven’t really given much thought to exactly how much damage they will actually do.”

  “I think you’re overreacting,” Garret said from the floor.

  “Sure I am. And you are under-thinking. All you can think about, Garret, is how much money you can make from it. And you, Brian, all you can think of is some touchy-feely version of a cashless utopia, everyone pursuing their dreams, except you haven’t realized that some people have dreams of killing, raping, stealing, lording power over others.

  “What’s going to happen to the world when you start putting this out there? Do you have a plan for that? Are you just going to upload the modules to YouTube and have Brian distribute as much dope as he can make? Don’t you think Brian’s ‘friends’ will want to try to make some money from it? Don’t you think when they find out, they are going to want you two dipshits to work for them and only them, making them modules that deal with things like ‘how to steal more money,’ or ‘how to dispose of bodies,’ or whatever the mafia does these days?

  “The government? You think they aren’t going to hear about your little business and get involved? You think you are going to make royalties and get rich when they learn your little trip and induction routine can instantly teach people anything they want to learn that a module has been made about? You should make a module that teaches what happens when they make you disappear and force you to work in some underground lab for the rest of your life, or until you are no longer useful because they’ve tortured the drug formula from Brian, and your induction code from you,” she finished with disgust.

 
After staring them down for at least a minute, she added, “What about all the religious crazies that will use this to their advantage? Remember what fundamentalist religions have already done for us.”

  Brian and Garret both knew she was talking about Tel Aviv, and the smoking, radioactive crater that was a result of religion gone too far into the extreme. And the eight capitals of the largest, Islamic-dominated countries that paid the price of revenge for it.

  CHAPTER 6

  December, 2043

  Derry didn’t speak to either of them for almost three weeks. She wouldn’t return their calls, their texts, or their messages. Brian missed her company the most. He’d ramped up production for his clients to six nights per week to meet their increasing demand, and he missed the feel of her soft skin under the covers of his bed. Garret missed her because as much as he derided her opinions and sniped at her with little comments and criticisms, he was in love with her. It was a tricky situation, compounded by her aloofness when it came to sexual partners and by the fact that his best friend, roommate, and partner was in love with her as well.

  Within a week, they attempted to tell her that they’d had a serious sit-down and hashed out a plan. Brian would keep working on his refinement of the Receiver drug, while Garret would build new induction modules and convert current ones to the H-Vis format. Two weeks after she had erupted at them, they’d had another breakthrough. Switching to the H-Vis format shortened the module loop time to fifteen minutes for complex inductions. More importantly, some of the more pronounced psychotropic effects of Receiver could be toned down without affecting the drug’s ability to open the mind to accept the inductions.

  After the third week, Derry allowed them to apologize for being stubborn, overstimulated, greedy, altruistic half-wits. When Brian filled her in on their progress, her first question was to ask if they’d formed a plan. Garret admitted they hadn’t actually progressed that far yet, brushing the concern away quickly with a wave of his hand. His words soon ran together in excitement as he fleshed out the details of some of their advances that Brian had briefly touched on. She became enraged, demanding that she be put in charge of The Plan while they worked on bringing the two components together in an efficient, permanent package.

  The Plan would detail how they were going to effectively distribute the drug and the learning modules when everything was in place. The Plan would determine when Receiver was in its final revision, and what kinds and how many of the induction modules would be made. The three of them would also attempt to figure out the logistics of mass saturation, along with the necessary safeguard protocols to protect them from the blowback that was sure to come, and work that necessary contingency into The Plan.

  Derry was sure, and finally convinced the two boys, that the instant they put the video on YouTube, it would get shut down. It might last as long as an hour, she argued, or it might only last ten seconds before being wiped. The Plan had to consider this and utilize as many distribution channels as possible. Their planning, she continued, must be based around the assumption that government suits or corporate thugs definitely would trace it all back to them. They needed to have a fail-safe in place to make sure that when such an eventuality happened, the recipe and the modules would begin quietly seeding all over the world, from thousands of random devices, denying any single agency sole possession of either component.

  Everyone on the planet knew, or at least believed, that once something got on the net, it was impossible to eradicate. It was true, for the most part, but only if the item in question had been seeded to enough users across the world to guarantee that it would live on through multiple eradication attempts by governments, security outfits, and service providers. If seeded long enough for it to permeate every corner of the internet, not even propaganda campaigns warning of the dangers to life or liberty, if caught with whatever song, video, document, or program the powers that be didn’t want law-abiding citizens to know about, could slow its momentum. If they only loaded it to YouTube and it only amassed a thousand views, it was unlikely to propagate very far before the authorities showed up to confiscate every user’s personal computer and tablet. Including the ones in Brian and Garret’s apartment.

  However, if they uploaded it to YouTube, U-Vid, VidCasa, and the dozens of other video sharing networks, along with seeding it on N-Torrent networks, the FireFly sharing networks that were all the rage with teenagers, and even the old Usenet newsgroups for the geriatric crowd, there was a ninety-nine percent chance that it would hit critical saturation stage within twenty-four hours. All they needed was one hour of seeding before it would be too late for authorities, or anyone else on the planet, to stop its proliferation.

  The broken cog in the machine was the Receiver drug. It would take but a few taps of a tablet or keystrokes on a computer to send the induction modules on their way to devices all over the planet. Delivering a drug that was unknown to everyone but the three of them, manufactured with tightly-restricted chemicals, was the insurmountable problem. Brian left that to Derry to figure out. When she asked him how many doses he could produce in a typical month, she wasn’t impressed with the answer of “about five hundred…maybe.”

  “There has to be a way to make more than that,” she complained.

  “If I could get unlimited access to Lyborsol, Hydrathanol, and some disulfomine without, you know, alerting authorities, I could probably make hundreds of thousands per month,” Brian sighed.

  “Is there no way to substitute components from something cheaper or more easily available?” she asked.

  “I doubt there is a sub for Lyborsol, but the other stuff I could extract from commercially available substances that contain it. The Hydrathanol might be a bit of an issue, as it is sort of new, and fairly toxic. In a real lab, I could make it without too much trouble. But my own little ‘lab’ at the house isn’t set up for manufacturing raw chemicals or creating complex, large-scale reactions.” He shrugged. “It will be a bit of work to get it, but nothing impossible. The problem though is the difference between pocket meth and pure meth.”

  “Pocket meth?” she asked, unfamiliar with the term as well as most of the non-hallucinogenic street drugs.

  Cocaine, meth, Crash, none of that appealed to Derry. She liked her acid trips and bean rolls…and real mushrooms whenever she could actually find that rarity. Texas ranchers didn’t look too kindly on high school and college kids picking through their pastures for ‘dope,’ and it wasn’t worth the hassle or the expense of trying to grow them, even if an earthen basement and all of the right equipment were available.

  “Yeah, pocket meth is this crap you can make in your own bathroom or kitchen. You take some really nasty ingredients that you can buy at the drug store and cleaning supply places, a few pill packs of pseudoephedrine from Canada or Mexico, and ‘cook’ it all up in about fifteen minutes with a thick-walled glass container. Except you don’t really cook it, since it doesn’t require heat. The chemical reaction from the mix does all the cooking. If you do it wrong, you’ll die when you smoke or shoot it, if you aren’t already dead from the fumes or chemical burns when it explodes in your face while mixing it.

  “My shit, on the other hand, is purified, extremely potent, and pharmaceutical-grade. Except the drug companies don’t make the stuff I make. And even if they did for legit medical reasons, because of the constant practice and refinement I’ve had, I doubt they’d make it as pure or as strong as mine. I’m sure they eventually would, with their thousands of R&D engineers and unlimited funds for lab time, chemicals, whatever.

  “The point is, I can’t reproduce Lyborsol, and it’s the main factor in how Receiver unlocks the memory areas of the hippocampus and temporal lobe. I’ve tried making batches without the Lyborsol, but the induction doesn’t stick, and the trip itself is very, very unpleasant. If I had a pro lab and some assistants, I could probably synthesize it. I’m too far into the revisions of the drug to back all the way out and try to get this one specific effect from some other
compound. Again…a lab and assistants, and this wouldn’t be a problem.” Brian looked down at his feet.

  “Okay. We’ll figure something out, I’m sure.” She put down the tablet that she’d been typing notes into.

  “That’s it? Just ‘okay?’”

  “What else can I do, Brian? You’re the chemist. The ‘cooker.’ I’m a stupid Lit major that always gets ranked out when I try to talk about science with you or Garret.”

  “You aren’t stupid, Derry,” he said. He moved out of his computer chair and into the beanbag chair with her. “You were the one who got us to stop being stupid. You were…are the voice of reason. What we are going to do is probably destructive. Is it a good idea to maybe give humanity a big evolutionary push without any of the small, sometimes tedious steps between major jumps in technology or biology?”

  “You know how I feel about that,” she said. “But it’s going to happen one way or another. I’m just in it to make sure we try and do it with the least amount of heartache.”

  “What if you can’t?” he asked, wrapping an arm around her.

  “I can at least say I tried.”

  *****

  February, 2044

  “Check this out,” Garret said the instant Brian walked in the door.

  “Let me get my ass in the door, man.” Brian laughed. “I need a beer. And a bowl.”

  “Fuck that, man. Sit your ass down and check this out,” Garret demanded, handing Brian the pipe when he sat down in the computer chair.

  “What am I supposed to be checking out?” Brian asked through a cloud of smoke.