The God Gene (Age of Abundance Book 2)

by Dean C. Moore

  ***

  “I really needed to get out and stretch my legs,” the daft looking woman said getting out of the car. Who knew how undaft she looked prior to Corona messing with her head.

  “If you want a real thrill, try dodging traffic,” Nova suggested. The woman proceeded to tackle the cars head on, which autonaved around her at the last second. It was certainly a thrilling sport from Nova’s perspective. “Techa, what did you do to her mind that she would take anything I said at face value?”

  “I turned her into a Green like you,” she said, walking around to her side of the seat. He shook his head at Corona, “Ha, ha. I’ll have you know we Greens are not Primitives. We’re what you’re evolving into, you know, where the tech is just so seamless it’s invisible.”

  “Techa help us,” she said, getting into the passenger seat.

  “You’re letting me drive?”

  “Only way for you to learn just how far you can push this reliance on external tools before you have to upgrade your own mind and body.”

  “You’re such a manipulative bitch, I swear.”

  “You’ll appreciate what I do for you one day when you have kids of your own to raise.”

  He got in the car, happy to be out of the rain of perpetual bullets and laser fire. The car was immune to both. He took the car into the air and right into the flock of “birds”. And he fired an EMP pulse at them.

  The last of the drones dropped out of the sky like stones.

  “Nice. How did you learn to drive the car so fast?”

  Nova shrugged. “I just think what I want and it does it.”

  She frowned. “Should have went with a more primitive model to prove my point. You thought up the EMP pulse on your own too?”

  “Yep.”

  “Not bad for a Neanderthal.”

  “I told you, you worry too much.”

  “You’re getting by right now because the car is smarter than you are!”

  She sighed and took a second to regroup. Speaking more calmly, she said, “And what if the car isn’t smart enough to get you out of your next mess? What if you don’t have any tools at your disposal to rely on besides your own mind and body and their responsiveness to you? You know, the mind and body you can’t entirely control, and can’t do much even if you could control them better?”

  Despite the bumpy ride with one air pocket and cross-current after another, causing his stomach muscles to clench and his neck to go stiff, he still managed to crane his neck towards her for the satisfying glare he had every intention of leveling at her. “And what, I’m supposed to spend the rest of my life playing these what if games?”

  “Yes! It’s the only way to stay safe.”

  “Spoken like someone with some real safety issues.” She touched his chin forcefully enough to aim his head forward in time to avoid a head-on collision with another aircar, whose driver was also enjoying manual steering over autonav, but who also couldn’t simultaneously be bothered to watch where she was going. Nova screamed one of those intolerable female soprano screams from a bad horror movie that left his throat feeling hoarse and swerved the steering wheel. Okay, so playing chicken wasn’t his thing. According to Nietzsche, character development was all about finding things to say “no” to.

  As it turned out the primal scream from the fright of his life was quite the destressor. He returned his attention to her and picked up his argument where he’d left off. “That’s not living. You may as well be some AI programmed to do nothing but play war games day and night. You’ve lost all humanity by that point.”

  “Yeah, well, humanity is overrated,” she said sheepishly, as if thinking he might have a point, just not enough of one to get off her high horse or to change her compulsive behavior for one second.

  She pointed at the horizon. “Finally, some help proving my case.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a category-eight tornado.”

  “It’s a what?! I thought even a category-five over land was rare.”

  “That’s because it’s not natural. Someone’s hacked the Uber-Mind, at level 3. It would take at least that much mind power to generate this.”

  “Just one localized weather system? I doubt it.” Nova grimaced, clamped down on the steering wheel as the ride was getting even rougher than before.

  “Butterfly effects have to be considered for the entire planet. Besides, it’s not local. Extreme weather is happening all over the world. A sure sign of Level 3 involvement if ever there was one.”

  “Haven’t you heard of global warming?”

  “I’m not speculating, Nova. I’m getting this off the mindnet.”

  Nova gulped. “What am I supposed to do against a Level 3 breach? Not even you can come up against that, can you?”

  “Highly doubtful in the timeframe we have to work with.”

  The wind overcame any effort at manual steering he could apply, and the autonav both. Their aircar went careening up against numerous others. He felt like one of those ping pong balls in a giant sphere after the wind is applied to force one of them through the shoot just so the number on the surface could be called for the state lottery.

  Eventually the same cross currents threw the cars clear of one another. His screaming still unabated, he glanced over at Corona and saw her sitting calmly, if with a concerned look painted across her face, and her fingers pressed against her eardrums. “I’ll have you know those were manly screams,” he said, “like the war cries of a true warrior.” She ignored him, which he didn’t take as a good sign. If his humor wasn’t working to destress the both of them, that meant they really did have a bigger problem on their hands than even she could face.

  “What about everyone on the ground?” he said.

  “The smart buildings are rated to Category-Six. Some of the nano-infused self-healing ones can handle Category-Seven. It’s possible the City AI can make up the difference to ward off a Category-Eight weather attack, but yes, whoever is after you is willing to risk millions of lives and not just here, but around the world.”

  “Level 4 of the ubermind will undo the hack to its Level 3 consciousness, and will shut down the perpetrators quick enough.” The feebler, “I think,” he added only on account of the building they were being hurtled towards, like a cannonball out of a cannon.

  “A lot of people could die in the minutes or even seconds it takes to do that,” she said, eying the same sight out the window, and putting her feet up on the dash, and wrapping her hand around her knees in a fetal position. Again, he didn’t particularly take this as a good sign and as a rather pathetic show of confidence in his abilities.

  Nova pulled up hard on the steering wheel, shot them up the side of the skyscraper about an inch from its surface. “See that! I’m doing it. I’ll be damned if I’m not doing it.”

  They shot up and above the top of the skyscraper and kept going. Right into the bottom of a jumbo plane.

  Their aircar bounced off the plane’s underside; the Boeing jetliner was upgraded, as all the commercial aircraft were these days, against rocket propelled grenades launched from hand held rocket launchers.

  From there, the aircar continued to ricochet off of one airborne item after another. Some of those items were other aircars, some were homes ripped off their foundations. “That last house was pretty nice, huh?” he said as they flew through it. “Maybe we should upgrade our modest bungalow after all.”

  They didn’t fare as well coming up against what looked like a spaceship—as in UFO. They bounced off of it, headed the opposite direction. “Did you see that? Just how big is this storm?”

  “It was a rooftop restaurant shaped like a spaceship, you moron.”

  “I’m not a moron just because I don’t entertain ideas of eating at such fancy places,” he said, standing his ground. “It just makes me modest and unassuming, that’s all. And what’s more, I hope you appreciate this improvised game of pin ball I created for us, turning the entire sky into one big pinball machine. I keep
racking up points like this, my record will stand for all eternity.”

  “I’d be impressed if it stood for the duration of the Category Eight tornado.”

  He banged the steering wheel. “What’s so damned important about me that they’re willing to kill this many people?!”

  “That Category-Eight tornado is upon us,” she said in her usual deadpan.

  “What do you mean, ‘it’s upon us?’ Just what do you think I’ve been dealing with all this time?” If he couldn’t stop himself from talking with so much upward inflection at the end of his sentences, courtesy of uncontrolled excitement, she was going to start taking him for Trinidadian.

  “The peripheral currents. They’re a joke compared to what comes next. I’m taking over the navigation. Survival trumps teaching you a lesson. I’ll find us a trajectory in the vortex that spits us out rather than sucks us in.”

  The car morphed in response to her more powerful mind. As soon as she engaged it, the steering wheel melted back into the dashboard at this end and unfolded on her side of the car. She looked so calm it was as if she were in a trance as she took control.

  “Could you at least look a little freaked out? I swear that whole transhuman groove on you just doesn’t wear nearly as well as you think it does.” She either wasn’t listening, was actively ignoring him, or… what?

  The tornado caught them up. He was using his arms like an octopus, like he had more than two, constantly looking for a place to secure him from the crazy fun-park ride they were on. Unable to calculate the shifting forces working against him fast enough. He lost his lunch, barfing all over the dashboard. The self-cleaning car whisked it away before the smell of his own bile could make him any sicker.

  “Techa, if that doesn’t clarify things?” he said, staring at the cow and the horse staring back at him with accusative eyes. Maybe they were examples of the sentient animals with a mindnet connection so knew exactly what was going on and held him personally responsible.

  He craned his head to see if he could see up through the windshield the girth of the Category-Eight tornado. “I don’t think there are horses or cows for a hundred miles.” He noticed the Model T Ford. Mint condition. Saw the license plate. “I know that car! It’s from the Chicago museum. No way this twister is that big. Unless… unless we’re just in the narrow end of the spout.” He gulped.

  ***

  Corona got the tornado to spit her and Nova out of the vortex. She brought the car down in the parkway.

  They climbed out of the vehicle and stared at the sky. The storm was in rapid remission. “Looks like ubermind Level 4 resolved the problem.” He returned his attention to her. “So, back to my original question? Who would want me bad enough to risk this many lives? And why?”

  “That primitive brain of yours is still good at asking the right questions. Too bad it isn’t worth much come time to furnish some answers.”

  She took him by the arm again and led him off. “Will you stop doing that?” he barked. “I’m not a child.”

  “Says the man with no transhuman perspective on his situation.”

  He yanked his hand away from her angrily. Heard a roar. “Shit! Is that a…?” He turned to corroborate what he already knew to be true. “A T-Rex? You landed us in the dinosaur park?! Are you mad?”

  “Figured it would be easier to dodge attackers from the past versus those from the present.”

  “And you say it’s my thinking that’s faulty? You sure you don’t have a few transhumanist wires crossed in that souped up brain of yours?”

  The T-Rex roared again and charged them. “Um, you can take my hand now,” he said, holding it out to her. But she was already running ahead of him. “I’m not kidding. Really, you can take my hand!”

  The trail opened on a picnic area, a wide disc of a lawn a few acres in diameter. Picnickers were enjoying their baskets and one another. He screamed at them. It seemed like the polite thing to do. “Run!” he shouted. “Run, Techa damn you!” They stared at him as if he were mad. Nova and Corona grabbed a couple dirt bikes from the one couple that had panned nonchalantly away from the T-Rex to look at them with amazement. “You don’t mind, do you? Clearly you can abide most anything,” Nova said. They throttled up the bikes and sped off.

  The next thing Nova remembered was taking headers over one mound after another, the bike leaping so far into the air, he felt as if he were offering himself up as a hors d’oeuvre to the dinosaur snapping at air and just missing him each time. The only thing eclipsing the roar of his motorbike’s engine was the roar of the T-Rex.

  “Why do you think the picnicker didn’t flinch at the sight of this thing?!” he shouted to Corona as they were taking one of their morning “flights.”

  “The T-Rex tracks by movement, like most animals. They knew if they lay perfectly still, the creature would ignore them for us.”

  “That doesn’t seem very gracious of them.”

  “The next hill, the bikes go, but we don’t. Understand?”

  “No, not really.”

  She jumped off her bike as she sent it vaulting off the hilltop. He rolled off his in the same manner. They watched the motorcycles get bitten out of the sky like flies caught in the T-Rex’s mouth. Nova gulped. “Good call.”

  “This way,” she said.

  He sighed. “I swear you’re the bossiest person I know.”

  He followed her into a cave. They were sort of safe for now. Providing they didn’t mind the T-Rex sticking its face in and snarling at them within inches of their feet. Between the terrific roars turning his ears into steel drums, and its stinky breath, it was really giving the whole “safe haven” concept a go for its money.

  She smiled, looking at the contours of the cave, illuminated, considering how freaked out he still was, by his brightly glowing skin. Too bad the T-Rex couldn’t squeeze enough of his head inside to fit his eyes. Nova’s best defense now was to blind it with a pulse of bright light. There were initials carved into the rocks from prior lovebirds using it for more than just hiding out.

  “The park is rife with these hiding spots so the parents can feel good about bringing their kids to the park,” she said.

  “Yeah, right? And when they can’t get to one in time?”

  “Most people don’t send their actual bodies into the park, but an avatar.”

  “An avatar?”

  “Yeah, a robot body they remain connected to, while they lie in stasis. They can feel everything it feels, thinks, senses. The more advanced incubators actually 3D-print a body-double that goes into the park. Everything it experiences is ultimately transferred back to you when the double returns to the pod for disposal.”

  “Very accommodating of that body double!”

  She shrugged. “Some keep them around, figuring the more copies of them the better. They share memories at night when they sleep.”

  “But…”

  “Can we stay on point?!”

  “Yeah, sorry.” Nova kept waiting for the T-Rex to give up on taunting them and move on. But evidently primitive reptiles were well known for their endurance. Its loudness and ferocity of its snarls did seem to be diminishing some.

  “The best I can figure is, one, whatever is inside you is an activated form of what’s in everyone Neuro-Tech ever enhanced. Facing such a massive recall at the fear that other inactive genes could go active, they’re sparing no expense to bring you down. They can learn from you what caused the gene to go active, then roll out the gene fix to everyone else. It’s still the cheaper alternative.”

  “Provided the original gene hacks aren’t traced back to them. Then they won’t just be facing possible financial ruin, they’ll be facing jail time.”

  “Which takes me to scenario two, the perennial quest for increased market penetration.”

  “Say what?”

  “I don’t know how many of you Neanderthals are left, but there might be enough to force them to experiment to see at what point you’re willing to upgrade, past all religious con
victions, or any other silly notions people have floating around their heads that enough tech is enough tech already.”

  “Well, doesn’t everyone feel enough is enough, eventually? Maybe my thermostat is set on low and theirs is set on medium or high, but sooner or later everyone reaches the point where they feel the tech is no longer enhancing their lives but taking away from it.”

  “Once again, an excellent point for such an unupgraded mind. That would actually be an even better explanation for why they’re subjecting you to this treatment. Too costly to subject everyone to it, but just enough folks, or even the one, and televise it enough, and voila, suddenly a lot more people are a lot less comfortable with their state of the art or not-so-state-of-the-art upgrades.”

  “Why doesn’t the Uber-Mind tackle the source of the problem rather than just attacking the symptoms?”

  “Because whoever is hacking it is that good at erasing their tracks.”

  “I thought no one was that good.”

  “Certainly not in the public sphere, they’re not. This is corporate, as we determined already.”

  The T-Rex had finally given up. Its frustrated roars, and the vibrations from its stomping feet were diminishing as it made its way towards its next hoped-for meal.

  “Come on, let’s get out of here,” Corona said, “I’m feeling cramped.”

  “You’re feeling cramped! Would you rather feel what it’s like to have your head bitten off?”

  “Having it bitten off once and for all would be a relief versus having it bitten off all day every day with you.”

  “Ha-ha. Suddenly she’s a bag of laughs. I’d prefer a bag of peanuts for comfort food if we’re heading back out there.”

  “Relax. Like I said, the supersentience overseeing the park won’t allow high tech border penetrations to ruin the theme park atmosphere. That’s about as much protection as we’re going to get for now. Might not be much, but we’ll need all the lag time we need to think up a workaround to whatever they throw at us next.”

  “That’ll be a while from now, right? Don’t they have to have a meeting first to decide if it’s still worth the money to keep coming after me?”