“Maybe.” She stretched out her hand to him. He shook his head. “Nuh huh. Sex, copious sex is the only thing getting me out of this cave. Maybe with enough tantric poses and the come will reach my brain and convert it into a more evolved version of myself, like manna from heaven.”
She smiled at him and decided it wasn’t such a bad idea. He really did perk up after a gymnastic bout with her.
***
A few seconds into their foreplay, Nova shouted, “I’m trying to have a little comfort sex here!”
The T-Rex had resumed its thrashing against the mouth of the cave, snarling, spitting, and roaring, apparently happy to provide all the motivation he needed to retreat into his “safe” place.
Nova decided to take his cues from the dinosaur, waving his tongue around Corona’s cave opening. Leaving teeth marks at or near its borders. Snarling—a rather aggressive version of blowing kisses—against her vulva. She laughed when she caught on to what was going on. “You’re taking lessons in romancing from a dinosaur?” After some moaning, she gasped, “Probably not a bad idea, considering where these instincts come from.”
Later, juiced up, literally, Nova and Corona found their sprint from the cave mouth to be livelier than their dash to it earlier. The dinosaur that had given up on them reprised its interest upon catching their scent and seeing them out in the open.
She made it to the next “safe haven” just ahead of him, her nano-infused muscles proving far more reliable than his. If they weren’t both so giddy on love hormones he was sure she would have thought to carry him the remaining distance instead of playing a game of tag with him.
Nova felt the T-Rex’s breath on him as it bent its head down and opened its jaws. Like one of those tractor scoops, Gagantua scraped his gaping mouth along the ground until Nova could see its teeth in his peripheral vision framing him like a portrait. Nova was phosphorescing so brightly by then he felt as if he were a doctor giving the thing a tooth exam. His luminescence fluorescing colonies of bacteria invisible in ordinary light. He must have been shining bright enough for the thing to take notice. The make-do cave of the dinosaur’s mouth providing the darkness the creature needed to be startled by Nova’s brightness. The dinosaur pulled back, screamed in frustration and ran off. The miniature earthquakes he left with each stomping foot putting the final chiropractic touches on Nova’s spine.
About then, Nova was skidding into the cave that Corona was standing in. “I don’t get it,” he said. “This cave is nothing like the other one; it’s plenty big enough for him to fit in.”
“I think I do,” she said, pointing to the enclosed lagoon. It was phosphorescing with luminescent jellyfish. They were so bright their lights illuminated Nova and Corona as well in their ethereal glows. “That dinosaur probably tried eating a few of these things, learned the hard way that organisms that glow in the dark are best left alone. The kids coming in here catch the glow, so they’re safe from it as well.”
Nova nodded. “I told you, you should take more interest in nature.”
The cool dankness of the cave drew his attention to the fact that he was soaked in sweat. He peeled his tee shirt off. Stripped out of his pants.
“Really? What are you, like fifteen?”
“It’s not about sex, okay,” he said, using his hands like windshield wipers to flick the sweat off of him. “I can’t stand being drenched in sweat. It makes my skin crawl.”
She shook her head in disbelief. “So what, you use a spacesuit when you do your forestry management?”
“I’ve been thinking about it.” His eyes hadn’t left his own body, his project of de-sweating requiring all of his attention.
She smiled despite herself, stepped up to him and threw her arms around him. “I suppose the least I can do for all I’ve put you through is lick it off of you.”
“The least.”
She ran her tongue up and down him. “Don’t forget those hard to reach places. Not everyone is as flexible as you.” His eyes went wide.
She bit her lips. “You can’t say that word without your mind going into overdrive, can you?”
He got so excited picking her up that he lost track of their proximity to the water’s edge. In they went. He freaked out at the sight of being surrounded by glowing jellyfish. Thus his own skin pulsed brighter than ever. The jellyfish backed off. “You think they’re afraid of me?”
“I think they speak your language.”
He kissed her. “Words are kind of overrated. Maybe we can just switch to hand gestures and chemical messages from now on,” he said, running his hands down her back.
TEN
Gecko pulled Corona towards him. They were seated in mirror positions on the gym mats, legs spread wide, helping each other to touch their chests to the ground, thus stretching the hell out of their lower backs and legs. “Cute,” she said, as he pulled her face into his crotch, craning her head up toward him.
He smiled. “Can I help it if you’re just that flexible?”
She concentrated on the stretch on her lower back despite his distracting penis in her face, then pulled back slowly, breathing in all the while, until she forced him to stretch forward. Her thinking had evolved since last they spoke, so she decided she needed to share it with him. “Our working theory is they’re not after Nova, per se, they’re just making an example of him. What they really want is all the primitives to realize it’s upgrade or die, or at least never feel safe until they do.”
“Not sure that tracks, sweetheart. Better to launch thousands upon thousands of smaller salvos against random people, none of which can be tracked to a singular source that collectively achieve the same aim. That way there’s no need to posit a conspiracy. But you try to come at everyone with one sustained media blitz funded by a particular party, or you single out one target, you risk discovery, and you risk ending up with the opposite effect. Namely, proving the existing system can protect against and expose the worst Machiavellian types, no more need for upgrades.”
She frowned, and then sighed, as much from the relief she felt in her muscles as from the realization. “You’re right. You’re better at these strategy games than I am,” she said, pulling his face into her crotch.
“Tell me about it.”
She stifled her smirk. Then let go of his arms and slapped him upside the head.
He perked up with an impish smile on his face. Then he picked her up and let her wrap her legs around him. “I do believe it’s time for our couple’s yoga.”
“Dream on.”
He bent her back, cradling her lower back with one arm, and forcing her chest back by applying pressure at her collar bone. “Why don’t you relax into the passive yoga while I try one of my bondage scenes on your mind?”
She smiled ruefully and shook her head slowly. “It’s you you’re torturing with these bondage fantasies, not me. Mind fucks and advanced hugging is what you’re reduced to now that my boyfriend’s back in town.”
He smiled his smug smile at her. “Not bad table scraps.” He kissed the nape of her neck. “Did it occur to you that you’re the one they’re stress-testing. That you’re the weak link in our hacker’s group whose managed to get on their radar. Now they want to know what you can and can’t do to see if your abilities are worth emulating in the form of an AI answerable to them, or if they’re worth fearing?”
Her eyes went wide. No, it hadn’t occurred to her. Not for a moment. But it would explain why they were coming at Nova and her in volleys as opposed to a sustained, uninterrupted, until death do they part campaign. By taking a more measured, studied approach, they eliminated both the threat of Nova and upped their own counter-hacking abilities by absorbing her strengths into their Big Brother tactics. Only when they had effective countermeasures in place for her gamesmanship, did they make another move on the board. It was a troubling enough notion, and if Gecko was right, all the more reason for him to be searching out the blind spots in her safety measures. “Fine,” she said, sighing surrender, “Do
your mind fuck thing you do so well.”
***
It didn’t take long for Gecko to hack through Corona’s defenses. The hive mind of the nanites occupying her neural synapses played a game of hot potato. Each one had a piece of the unlock code for tampering with her thoughts. They kept passing it to one another in a random fashion. You had to find thirty-seven hundred and fifty one of the bits to unlock the access point to her mind. Which meant it was just about impossible to get in without permission. But that mystery for later.
Corona found herself on an artificial gravity ship. She watched the gentle rotating arms of the ship spinning at the periphery just so to provide the .85 percent Earth gravity through the space port windows. Vast oceans of metal glass lining the expansive concourses that could be walked, airbiked, electric-bussed or simply flown, if you came with your own body suit. All to provide an unsurpassed view of the heavens. The windows would have been radiation shielded by a magnetic field, also artificially provided by the ship. Though she’d have to scan its neural net to figure out how it pulled that off for a vessel of this size. As tranquilizing as the spinning arms of the spaceport were to watch, the fact that the space station was crashing into Mars was less calming. Tended to kill the whole serenity effect. Usually took her a while longer to spot Gecko’s handiwork and the real nature of the danger to her. He was either getting sloppy or this was his idea of a warmup exercise.
She studied what to do about falling out of orbit. Hacked the Valencia’s neural net. Finding out the ship’s name was Valencia was the least of it. Irreparable damage had been done to its thrusters. It was nothing she was going to fix with hacking, at any rate. She wasn’t even convinced pulling on a spacesuit and going outside to handle mechanical repairs was going to accomplish much in the given timeframe. She briefly considered giving the assignment to a fleet of maintenance bots, which she could hack. There was actually a chance that option might work. Still, she hesitated. All too easy, from Gecko’s perspective. Even for a warmup exercise. Even for a solution that only had a sixty-three percent chance of success.
On an impulse she decided to let the ship crash. She sent the maintenance bots instead outside to fix it so the ship would be intact when it landed, as opposed to damaged beyond any salvaging. It occurred to her the Martians could use the extra real estate. Habitats were in short supply. Even with the 3D printers spewing out necessary materials twenty-four seven it would be some years before they no longer needed such “imports” from space. Since a healthy percentage of 3D printers had been tasked with building other 3D printers, the geometric progression would eventually take over. And in about five years’ time, Mars citywide infrastructure growth would be outpacing Earth’s. On Earth, creating such runaway effects was considered bad form.
Corona hacked the mindnet on Mars. It wasn’t much to speak of. Slightly more than five hundred interlinked humanoid minds, each humanoid genetically altered to thrive on Mars. Taller and leaner, to accommodate the lower gravity. Their bodies 3D-printed on site. Their consciousnesses uploaded to them from Earth. The original bodies “suicided” because the owners couldn’t be bothered to maintain them, even if the upload quality was still only eighty-nine percent. Meaning, only eighty-nine percent of the person survived intact. The transmission time to Mars for the upload had been cut to a few hours regardless of where the planet was relative to the Earth thanks to the chain of satellite links between Earth and Mars now. Most of those satellites were aged and abandoned ships and satellites from bygone eras now repurposed to live out their final days as a transmission relay node.
Considering how easy it was to print a 3D body, Corona wondered why there weren’t more humanoids. According to the mindnet, the powers-that-be deemed the 3D printers were best kept to building out infrastructure for now and for printing robot slaves. Those slaves could be hive-minded to accelerate infrastructure development and to secure the lives of the existing colony of five hundred plus humanoids. 3D human printing was also in its infancy. Even the early adopters weren’t that keen on being first generation. Some were willing to wait until the designers had ironed out the kinks. Especially the Mars pioneers that had no intention of maintaining a backup copy back on earth. And once again the powers-that-be didn’t want too many possible defective prototypes running about that could muck up the expansion efforts should one or more of them go AWOL enough to sabotage the city builder’s handiwork.
All in all though, the Martians, humanoids and robots alike, seemed to be holding their own. They had insurmountable obstacles aplenty, but that was why they were hive-minded together with their neural nets to tackle problems too big for individual minds to tackle alone. Problems like producing a magnetic field that could protect the planet from the sun’s radiation. Like planting a moon in orbit so they could have tidal flow once they built the oceans. Like keeping the atmosphere from floating away by increasing the gravity. Like bringing more water to the planet with comet bombardment. Early stage terraforming sucked. Better to arrive late to the party.
It didn’t help that the transwarp engines NASA and SPACE-X were cranking out, these days, not to mention any number of citizen scientists, made it so that explorers were no longer confined to the local solar system. They could go anywhere in the galaxy they wanted. Some could go anywhere in the universe, depending on just how advanced their transwarp engine. Some, it was rumored, could go anywhere in the multiverse. And basically, the farther away from Earth the better. Solar System protection didn’t mean much when your sun went Supernova, possibly ahead of schedule due to some mistake in the calculations, or subsequent to alien attack. Sooner or later humans and their expansion efforts would get on someone’s radar, and that someone might not be friendly. Not to mention there were rumors of black hole generators that could gobble up planets. That tech got out on the mindnet, there was nowhere safe. Nowhere known, anyway. Hence the perfect invitation to get off mindnet. Get lost in the multiverse somewhere no one could find you.
Even the delays in interplanetary communications were falling away by the day. Singularity phones could be 3D printed, meaning no amount of distance was too much to be transited instantly. The phones opened wormholes for trafficking information. Early prototypes ran the risk of sucking the user into one of them, or possibly gobbling up the planet, the very thing you were trying to avoid. Hence they were slow to proliferate. But proliferate they would.
It occurred to Corona to try something even as the alarms sounded on the space station portending impending disaster. She scanned the Martian surface for energy anomalies. Using a combination of the ship’s scanners and her link to Mars’s mindnet. It had started in the back of her mind as a crazy idea. That idea didn’t seem so crazy now. One of the transwarp engines was on Mars. Which begged the question, why? With an engine like that, why settle for anything in-solar system? The tech was hardly necessary for the undertaking.
She checked to see if the transwarp engine was responsible for sucking her toward the planet, confirming her suspicions. Not only was she being herded toward the Martian surface, so were countless other space stations, and not just from their local solar system. The thing was acting like a siren for autopiloted, self-maintaining space stations across the cosmos. It was creating a wormhole between itself and whatever it wanted to reel in.
This was the kind of thing that started intergalactic wars.
The fact that no such war seemed to be in progress suggested to Corona that whoever was behind this was smart enough to steal legacy tech from whatever other alien civilizations it had gotten a lock on, stealing stuff that would not be missed. Legacy tech relative to those civilizations, but relative to Mars, quite the boon to infrastructure expansion efforts. Who knew how much better the 3D printers were on these space stations, or what other tech might be repurposed for settling Mars in a fraction of the time. Why wait five years for a geometric reaction to kick in with the birth of 3D printers when you could reach that horizon in five months?
Whoever was behind t
his transwarp engine design was likely a citizen scientist. Who’d pulled off his one-of-a-kind prototype. Otherwise, everyone would be doing this. Including the fools who didn’t know enough to avoid a transgalactic war.
She did a more exacting survey of where their rogue terraformer was situating his space stations, which were all being reeled in just gently enough so they touched down without harm to the vessels. Meaning her robots outside the ship now weren’t really needed in that capacity. His transwarp engine apparently could adjust its settings in the nick of time to keep the ships from splattering like paint on landing. Ah, well. Nothing like a shallow learning curve.
The results of her survey caught her by surprise. She was already imagining some Chinese man or woman working the transwarp engine. The space stations were each being situated on the planetary chakras and nadirs, places where energy vortexes were created by intersecting energy lines. Just to know that planets had energy bodies like the human body had energy meridians coursing through it, meant you were a subscriber to things like acupuncture and Chinese medicine. Opening these channels and conditioning them to move more and more energy transformed the body over time, healing it, even super-healing it. Eventually you ended up with Jedi Knights, just like in Star Wars, who could feed their bodies entirely off of Chi or “the force”. Though the maker of that film franchise had never stipulated how to pull off this Yoda-like transformation of the human into the trans-human without any further tech, the scientist Dean C. Moore had, some Western cynics would say pseudo-scientist.
There were quite a few transhumans on Earth following in the path he laid down for them. Although he had replaced the “midichlorians” which were modified mitochondria—again according to the film franchise lore—with nanotech that fed off of the chi energy coursing through the body. Themselves modified from bacteria which fed on electrical currents directly, discovered on Earth circa 2016 or so. They functioned, ironically enough, like cyborg mitochondria that always craved more energy and so pulled more chi through the body.
The God Gene (Age of Abundance Book 2) Page 9
