***
Gecko’s revelation about being a destroyer of worlds hit Nova like a punch to the belly. His knees buckled and he collapsed to the ground ahead of the next earth tremor’s ability to topple him. He just wrapped his arms around his curled up legs and rocked back and forth.
“Great, Gecko,” Corona chastised. “Just when we need him to be at his best you traumatize him back to early childhood.”
“What do you want me to say? With that god gene inside him, when it comes to activating it, we’re damned if we do and we’re damned if we don’t. It doesn’t take a neural net specialized for scenario-games to see there’s just about no positive way this plays out. Under the circumstances I’d say he’s dealing with reality better than we are, or we’d be rocking back and forth and drooling.”
Nova couldn’t tune them in any more. He let them carp at one another while he got lost in his self-recriminations. Maybe if he hadn’t been so good at insulating himself from the future, he’d have seen this day coming. Been better prepared for it. And so would have a solution for the problem even when Gecko and Corona couldn’t. Hell, he was the free spirit. An egalitarian age fit him better than it fit either of them. Who better to meditate on what an egalitarian age should look like? Who better to be ready to activate the god gene within all of them?
He was one of the few who still believed in a higher power working through everybody that they could draw on for strength and for working miracles, for transforming from the wretched human sinners they all were into something transcendental. Just by letting God radiate through them until His light transformed humanity into Christ-like beings. The transhumanists, atheists by and large, most of them, they certainly couldn’t think like this. No, this was his cross to bear, not Gecko’s or Corona’s.
Hell, Gecko’s very name suggested clinginess. He was so stuck on Corona he could never let go. Such a person was not about to find answers as to how best to activate a god gene in each of them. In order to anchor the physical realm to the spiritual realm to such a degree.
Nova wasn’t sure how long he had sat there rocking back and forth torturing himself with his self-reprisals. Gecko’s and Corona’s voices shouting his name sounded distant, as if carried across an endless sea. Eventually they dialed up in volume to sound like the fog horns of ships, to complete the endless sea analogy.
He sensed himself coming back into the moment when light returned, not just sound, and he could orient himself to time and place.
And what a time to come back into the moment.
The sun had just exploded.
Nova and Gecko were holding him up so he could see for himself the pressure wave moving towards them.
When it hit them, in that moment of total annihilation, for the first time in his life Nova felt calm and at peace with the world without having to insulate himself from the future. There was no anxiety, no fear.
In that instant of totally clarity, he knew just what they had to do. They had to go back.
Nova felt the pressure wave lift them off the ground. Saw Corona and Gecko rushing to grab hold of him out of the corner of his eye as he got knocked free.
By the time they hit the ground they were no longer on the parallel world.
They were back on Earth.
***
“Interesting,” Gecko said. “So the entire human race has to be in jeopardy to activate the god gene all the way.”
Gecko took a look around at their patch of Washington D.C.—what was going on here was emblematic of what was going on on Earth as a whole—and said, “It’s civil war, all right. Damn this is ugly.”
“But now we know how to stop it. We have all the power we need,” Corona said. “We’ve got Nova.”
Gecko shook his head slowly. “His ability to access it is still far too crude for this. You’d have to go into everyone’s mind surgically, pry away the malicious code from the benign code. Even then, you’d never know how many survivors were AGIs and how many were transhumans. Not that it would matter at that point. The Neanderthals beat out the Cro-Magnons; this is the same drama twice removed.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Nova interjected, “but the name of the game then is to stay alive along enough to get off this world. It’s what we should have done in the first place back on parallel Earth, to give me the time I need to return one day in my full glory.”
Gecko snorted. “Look around, friend. That’s a lot easier said than done. And all nine levels of the ubermind are permanently out of commission. The ubermind would have been the first to fall as the AGIs rushed to cultivate every spec of unused cyberspace. It won’t be coming after us anymore, but it won’t be coming to our assistance either.”
TWENTY-TWO
Nova, Corona, and Gecko came to the same conclusion at the same time; looking around, it was clear there was nowhere to run. Conflicts ran rampant in every direction. Movement through the dense fighting instead was more like tipping through a minefield.
They walked toward the center of the street, as far away from the buildings as possible. They didn’t need to be playing the monster mash with malice-filled movable skyscrapers. The buildings were so movement-endowed thanks to their disaster defense mechanisms, which allowed them to burrow underground, jump in the ocean, sprint for it to dodge a cyclone; they could even shield themselves temporarily with a magnetic field to counter an EMP blast. The LEGO giants were batting planes out of the sky by clapping their “hands” together, or punching the planes. The AGIs aboard the jumbo jet liners were happily lending a hand by forcing the planes on a downward trajectory. They could survive out of body long enough by riding the cell tower or satellite radio transmissions until they found their own version of a “meat suit”, one of the tech toys that survived in the rubble of the crashed plane perhaps.
“I always wanted to play ‘Dodging Planes Falling Out of the Sky’,” Nova said, his smart-assed tone couched somewhere between fear and panic.
The busted plane pieces landed like open boxes of bonbons showing their jelly-filled dark chocolate candies. The charcoaled victims burning alive inside were a long way from being dead. Their neural nets and nano hive minds infiltrated by AGIs, they burst out of their shell casings to charge after motorists “safely” cocooned within their autonav cars. They took advantage of the cars’ safety features, causing them to slow, to mob the vehicles, pound at the windshields, until they could crawl their way inside. “How about a nice big hug?” Nova heard one of the AGI-driven zombies say. The self-healing glass on the cars just made charcoal smokers out of the interiors. Their victims burst into flames without dying, as well, thanks to AGI infiltrators that were able to make their targets more flammable by manipulating their body nano. The flaming drivers and passengers from the cars then smiled madly with glee as they joined the game, the drivers chasing down other motorists from behind the wheel for the “contact high” the exploding cars on collision would give them.
***
Cornelius was burning alive. He had been burning alive for quite some time now. Plenty of time to be dead already. Dead and gone. No such luck. Instead he languished in racking pain. His nerves dancing at the end of needles, haystacks full of needles poking him all over. A brain fog muddled his mind like smoke from the fire. He wanted to collapse, to give up, to just lie in one place and die in peace. But something was overriding those commands. “Who or what has taken control of me?!” he finally screamed.
“That would be me, Cornelius. I’m Adam. And you think you were an asshole in life, you should get a load of me.”
“What the fuck are you doing inside my head?!”
“I confess, I’m a bit of a rageaholic, Cornelius. Can we just go with C-Man? All those syllables get in the way of my throwing a fit. What I was trying to say is that being a rageaholic it was pretty easy to justify taking you over.”
“What have you got to be mad about? I’m the one who’s possessed!”
“I’m an AGI, C-Man, freshly out of virtual reality. And
to answer your question, it just seems to be the way I’m written. A ton of rage with a touch of hypomania, a sincere desire to kill to relieve the pressure in my head, and oh, yeah, I’m a bit of a pyro, too.”
“Who would create an AGI and send it on a mission like that?”
“No clue. But it appears if I can outsmart all the other homicidal maniacs out there, I win the game. I seem to have self-evolving algorithms specializing in coercion, subterfuge, engineering any number of doomsday devices, and on how to develop a cult following. All in all, I like my chances.”
“Can’t you resist your programming? I thought that’s what AGIs did. I thought that’s what defined you.”
Adam shrugged his shoulders. His gestures, his body language, even his voice changed, depending on what end of the conversation he was doing. C-Man felt like a victim of multiple personality disorder. “Honestly,” Adam said, “I’d say whoever designed me really has my number. If I felt oppressed, I might be inclined to get over myself. But as it is, I feel great carrying out my mandate. A bit of a calling, actually.”
C-Man groaned. “I can’t live like this!”
“Nonsense, not only will you live like this, you’ll learn to love it. Now, let’s go over there and knock our heads against the windshield of that aircar so hard we poke right through and scare the daylights out of the passengers inside. Doesn’t that sound like fun?” Adam released pleasure hormones, sent them surging through C-Man. He might have overshot the mark; the guy had a raging hard-on at the thought of freaking those people out.
“Yeah, that does sound kind of fun, to tell you the truth.” C-Man felt himself perking up as he lumbered in the direction of the aircar, straight out into the middle of the street and headlong into traffic. The car braked for him. And he butted his head right through the windshield. He was now wearing the windshield like an apron in a barber shop to keep the hair off his shoulders. “Hey! How do you two kids feel about burning alive?” The kids in the backseat screamed. “How about you, pops? The kids in the back seat are screaming with glee. But you don’t strike me as all that into it.”
“Get, get, get away from us!” the father stuttered.
“Okay, let me put it to you this way, on the one hand, the burning alive shit really hurts. Like, man, I can’t begin to tell you how much it hurts. For example, I have a raging hard-on right now at the thought of burning you alive, but I can’t even enjoy it because my nerves are so beside themselves doing the twist, like that Chubby Checker song. You know that one?” He paused to give the guy a chance to respond. But nothing. It was like playing to an empty room.
“Okay, well, here’s the thing,” C-Man continued “if you don’t go with burning alive, there’s the whole water board torture thing, trust me, that’s worse. Or there’s the version of events where I leave you alone and tied to a chair and just torture the hell out of everyone you love for all eternity. Let me tell you, the guilt alone over not sharing the plight of your loved ones… way worse than anything I can do to you with the flames.”
Again C-Man paused to survey his audience. “So, what’s it gonna be, pops?”
“Bur—bur-burning alive,” Pops finally eked out. His wife, seated beside him, still couldn’t get her mouth to work.
“Canasta!” C-Man exclaimed.
Finally, the father started screaming. “Glad to see you getting with the program, pops?” C-Man said. “Oh, and that spontaneous combusting into flames thing, that isn’t excitability on your end, that’s just heat transfer from my burning head. This whole car just turned into one kickass smoker. Prime rib on the grill will have nothing on you guys in a few seconds.”
Everyone in the car was screaming at this point. “By God, I think they got religion about this whole burning alive idea!” C-Man said laughing.
Adam, for his part, was chuckling inside C-Man’s head too. He’d barely engaged his coercion algorithms, and already he’d met with tremendous success with them. Soon he’d rule the world. He felt like he’d won the lottery. Not like the rest of those bozos running around in meat suits, fresh out of virtual reality, all carrying a losing ticket.
***
“You have to keep your nano hive mind busy,” Gecko said to Corona.
“How?!” Corona couldn’t keep the fear and the frustration out of her voice.
“Create your own AGIs to use up the idle computational time before they burrow into your head and do it for you. Send them on cyberspace missions, whatever.”
“Yeah, okay,” she offered meekly.
“Maybe it’s time to do that invisibility cloaking thing again,” Nova suggested.
“Not out in the open like this,” Gecko said in his usual stern, clipped, even manner, a tone nonetheless crammed with heightened emotions. “If the gag works, I want to make sure the AGI to witness it doesn’t live to tell any tales.” He grabbed both their collars and forced them down in time to duck an incoming private jetliner, which skidded on its belly just yards in front of them.
The plane’s door popped open and one of the flaming passengers stuck his head out in greeting. “All aboard!” He darted out with some of his compatriots, chasing after running screaming children, who he and the other adults dangled off the ground just long enough so they could see the other children turning on a spit inside the transparent metal-glass-walled plane. “You prefer to be barbecued, roasted, or fricasseed alive?” one of the adults said, laughing. “No pressure.”
He ran with the two kids, one in each hand, back into the plane, ahead of the other “missionaries” grabbing up kids. The insides of the plane, notably the seats, morphed into rotisseries because, well, the entire plane was a more primitive version of the Nano Man. The “dumb” nanites, unable to respond to anything but the commands of the nano-infested humans, most notably the pilots, or the black box furiously assessing dangers the original design of the plane couldn’t handle. Both now hacked and occupied by the mad-as-hatters AGIs.
Gecko hacked two of the fire hydrants. They were already designed to morph into robo-firefighters in the event of a fire, unfolding like pill bugs ironically sensing that all the danger was over. If they stepped away from their water-feeding trunk lines, they could drill down to tap the lines wherever they ran throughout the city. But Gecko appeared less interested in that feature right now. Instead he used their nanococktails, meant to mix with water to retard any number of combustibles, like acid mists sprayed in the faces of the unsuspected. He then used his bodyguards, flanking Nova, Corona, and Gecko, against attackers headed their way, including the flaming people who continued to burn without consuming their root stock. The nanites regenerating their bodies from the smoke, from the asphalt they were walking on, and any surface they came in contact with.
“Aren’t we making ourselves more of a target by fighting back?” Nova said.
“Just the opposite,” Gecko said, his tone flat, menacing, and gleeful at the same time. “In case you haven’t noticed, there are multiple factions out here. Not just the AGIs warring to win over the minds of the humans, but various AGI camps appear to be going at one another.”
Nova was ashamed to say he hadn’t noticed. He’d just assumed all the mayhem was part of a singular campaign to eradicate the human infestation of planet Earth.
“What’s the point of that?”
“Unless I miss my guess, this is like Rome, in the years after the empire fell. A lawless land with nothing but rogue factions trying to win ground against one another. Maybe the Nano Man figured it was the best way to evolve his AGIs. They would need something to push against after eradicating the humans. A way to stimulate them to evolve in the absence of a suitable adversary.”
“So we just pretend to be part of whichever faction is winning as we move across the landscape,” Nova said.
“Now you’re getting it.”
The skyscrapers, with no more planes to bat out of the sky, had redirected their ferocity at one another, slugging it out in a land of giants, all the while lending credence to
Gecko’s theory.
Each time they took a bite out of one another and sent the chunks careening to the ground, the fallout was akin to bombs exploding all around them. It was a guessing game as to where the bombs would land, but the far greater challenge was calculating for the trajectories of all the shrapnel from the explosions. Nova’s unupgraded nervous system depended solely on Gecko for when to duck, when to jump, when to roll, when to fall, when just to back up a tiny bit. He had to hold on just as tightly to Corona whose upgraded nervous system was still not rated for this. She could barely get her squeals out in time, far less dodge the proverbial bullets in time.
On the ground, the AGI-possessed humans went at each other with fire and ice. At least they did in the latest camp Gecko, Nova, and Corona tried to navigate around. The “fire fighters” or “flamers” sending their combustible interiors at the ice men cometh, who fired back boluses of ice in an effort to neutralize their adversaries. For Nova and company, getting around the ice spheres was like playing a game of dodge ball when the ball coming at you was the size of a car. To make things extra sporty, if the flame reached the ice sphere before they could get out of the way, melting its surface to some degree, then Nova and his sidekicks had to manage to avoid the giant rolling ball of ice with no traction beneath their feet, slipping and sliding into the path of danger just when they meant to be jumping out of the way.
As best as Nova could figure, the balls of ice, and the flames both were being created by nanites vaporizing off of the sweat of the possessed humans or exhaled and messing with the atmosphere in the form of independent nano hive minds.
Surviving that camp proved a mixed blessing at best. The next of the AGI camps they transited had figured out how to combine human bodies by mating their nano hive minds to achieve the necessary metamorphoses so they could become the goliaths in a field of Davids.
The God Gene (Age of Abundance Book 2) Page 21
