“This is about your dad, isn’t it? He’s military and a card-carrying member of the Alphabet Soup, and he hasn’t spoken to you in years. And you’re dying to find out what he’s up to that could be so damn important that it’s worth surrendering having any relationship with his own child. Any excuse to go hacking into his private affairs.”
She snorted, turned towards him with her fists migrating to her hips again, and absently kicked a broken bloody shard towards him. “Am I that transparent?”
“I bet I can tell you what self-evolving algorithms you’ve been cooking up on your mindchip, and why you got that nanococktail shot into you this morning. There might be a hundred and one reasons a person would want those upgrades. But in your case, I’m guessing you’re tooling up for encounters of the first kind with dear old dad.”
“Damn you for seeing right through me with that moronic, imbecilic, unupgraded mind of yours.”
“Because if I can do it, your dad’s already ten steps ahead of you. That’s what you really mean, which is why I’m going to take that dig on the chin. Have fun with that by the way. I have enough paranoid ideas about the government spying into my business without provoking such inquiries that could eliminate any shadow of a doubt I’m wrong.”
“Not to worry. I wasn’t planning to involve you in this.”
“No, of course not. That’s why you grabbed this case. And now I’m involved whether I like it or not.”
Monica groaned and pushed her hair back out of her face. It only now occurred to him that she’d only been pretending to be examining the apartment the whole time and just talking to him with whatever part of her brain was left over. But the fact was, he had her full attention. She was just waiting for this particular turn in the conversation to take place all along. “You could step off, say you need some time for the surgery to get a mindchip installed, or owing to the cancer…”
“And leave you alone to face your old man? The guy has the tech-enabling technologies that turn a man into a god. And you know I’m a sucker for David and Goliath stories.”
She smiled warily at him. “You want to get inside my pants, have all along, and figure the best way to do that is to bond during a crisis, the life and death kind, maybe even a series of them. If we live through them all, what could do more to bring two such unlikely people together? Who else could compete with that kind of history?”
“Am I that transparent?”
“Even without the mindchip.”
“Fine, but I’m picking out the colors for the baby’s room. I don’t care if you can talk to the nano-infused baby with your mindchip to find out what colors he prefers.”
She chuckled and snorted in one, setting down the porcelain Chinese clown knickknack. “You’re right. You can paint such vivid fantasies to live by, you don’t need a mindchip or a neurococktail to keep from feeling left out.”
“Told you.”
She gave him one of her head shaking smirk combos that translated to “you’re hopeless.” As opposed to “I’m so over you.” He hated generating one of those. By his tally, the “I’m so over you’s” were outnumbering the other kind three to one. So he was glad to score one for the other team this time.
He returned to the balcony for one last look at the dead body. The circus at ground level was disbanding. The body being carted off in the ambulance at the coroner’s behest, the cops chasing away the last of the people before getting in their cars and departing. Even inside Pancake Man’s apartment, the CSI team was rounding up the last of their information gathering robots, and putting away their electronic hand scanners. There was just a casual shake of the head by the head CSI to indicate that they hadn’t found anything, before the entire team departed.
Ethan and Monica had no right speaking so freely about the active investigation in front of the CSI team, but their mindchips would have been programmed to wipe anything from memory that wasn’t pertinent to their CSI duties, a failsafe to prevent unwanted information leaking to the media, or being bought by unscrupulous parties. The same memory wiping would occur vis-à-vis their forensic specialties the instant they opened their mouths to betray vital information about the case to unauthorized parties.
“I feel like we should be examining the dead body, speaking to the coroner, interviewing witnesses.”
Monica smiled at him. “Those days are gone, Ethan. We have the video tapes from the Apartment and Building AI’s that show everything that went on. His mindchip and nano net will fill in the missing pieces for us.”
“I thought we agreed they were all hacked.”
“Yes, we still have to find out how and why, but doesn’t change what we can actually see on the tapes.”
“His mindchip survived the fall?”
“My mindchip is keeping me abreast of the progress Pancake Man’s mindchip is making with its self-healing protocols, as far as information retrieval goes.”
He growled like a cornered animal. “But we have bosses to answer to that will want to know we crossed the T’s and dotted the I’s.”
“We have a department AI that can access my mind whenever she wants to make sure we’re making the best use of company resources, namely ourselves.”
He shook his head in disbelief. “So, we’re totally on our own then, or may as well be.”
***
“I still don’t understand what makes a Convergence Tech Wizard so terrifying that they’d want to take their own life or drive someone else to take them out,” Ethan said climbing into the car outside of Pancake Man’s flat.
“You have to appreciate the state of the art, Ethan,” Monica said, closing her driver’s side door behind her with a satisfying click. “We live in an age of hyper-specialists. Get a room full of physicists together and they still won’t be able to understand one another. The particle physicist won’t be able to talk to the solid-state physicist or the cosmological physicist or the biophysicist.”
“Sort of like the argument we made back in Pancake Man’s apartment about one computer hacker having all those hacking specialties mastered. Maybe back in the day but…”
“Yes.” She tilted the rearview mirror towards her to touch up her face with her compact and the other makeup kits in her purse. “Sometimes, you get enough of these specialists together and talking, they do begin to see the potential for combining the ideas from the other guy’s field. This is the beginning of convergence. Often it’s the one synthetic thinker in the group, the visionary, that can get them talking long enough to see the connections. That CTW, he’s the most primitive kind of Convergence Tech Wizard. He’s more of a business entrepreneur than an actual inventor.”
Ethan reclined in his seat to enjoy her makeover before the mirror. Like watching an actor getting into character.
“But every once in a while,” she said, “someone comes along who can see the potential in different fields of study for himself, how they can be brought together for world-changing effects. And he doesn’t need to assemble a team of specialists around him to build the component parts. He can do it all. And he can do it while advancing the tech in each of the fields until they can be brought together in the way that he wants.”
She returned the facial kits to her purse and progressed to stage two, fixing her hair with her hairbrush.
“Even with the transhuman upgrades,” she said, “the mindchips and the nanonets, these people are still very rare, and thank your lucky stars, because they are all major disruptors.”
“And you’re convinced this is what our pancake man is?”
“Aren’t you?”
Ethan made an “I’m still not sure I’m there yet” face as he shrugged.
“You sit with the problem a while longer,” she said, returning the hair brush to her purse and turning the engine of the car over manually. Perhaps because she just needed the tactile stimulation of a fast drive to ground her after getting inside Pancake Man’s head.
Ethan returned his seat to the upright position. “I guess from m
y perspective, you transhumanists are all disruptors, making the future happen much sooner than it should.”
“Sure, but that intelligence explosion has been described by Ray Kurzweil. It’s a stepwise progression. Each bit of progress towards goal takes less and less time as the transhumanists’ minds become more and more souped up.” She emphasized her point by how quickly she had to shift gears inside the accelerating vehicle. “So if you’re like that guy who starts with a penny on day one and doubles it each day, by the end of the month you’re a millionaire. That kind of change is hard enough for the human mind to wrap itself around. But it’s still just a geometric progression, and everything that pops into being has its place plotted nicely on the spiking line.” Already on the freeway, she was able to slip the sports car into its penultimate gear.
“But CTWs,” she continued, “they make mincemeat of that nice neat orderly progression into the future. Their minds function more like black holes, tearing the fabric of space-time. They can manifest something today that shouldn’t exist for hundreds of years, even factoring in for Kurzweil’s accelerating pace of innovation.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I guess I just have to see one of your CTWs in action. Otherwise, it’s just too abstract, this whole idea.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” she said, finding the top gear at last to compensate for her daredevil speed. The gear change as audible as the wind in his face. “That someone out there is prepared to demo his mind for you in all its glory.”
Ethan wasn’t sure if the grimace on his face was from the breakneck speed of her driving, or from her latest revelation.
FIVE
Axelman approached the Convergence Tech Wizard at his workbench on the twenty-third floor of the Verge building. The CTW looked shattered. Granted, he had one of those sunken-in chests that made him look as if he were perennially recovering from a kick to the ribs. And that kind of malnourished, sallow, stringy-haired look was hard to accomplish unless nano were to blame; not since the advent of Universal Basic Income, UBI for short. But if he looked as if he were dead man walking on a good day, today he looked as if, after touring purgatory and hell and finding nowhere would have him, he was truly beside himself. “What’s troubling you, Bitterman?”
“That Johnson guy. There’s no pleasing him! I swear he’s a fucking racist who just hates humans. We can’t do anything right.”
“Well, I can’t argue with you there. You just have to make it impossible to do without you, that’s all.”
“What do you think I’ve been trying!”
“Show me. I’m sure we can fix this. Between the two of us, we’ll do end runs around him.”
Bitterman pried himself up from his stool, working against the gravity of a thousand suns, judging by his expression, and walked to the edge of the work table. “It’s the cat’s ass, I don’t care what he says.”
“I think you mean ‘the cat’s meow’ but whatever. Show me,” he said soothingly. Up close, Bitterman smelled like old tennis shoes, the result of fear comingling with anger and resentment; the negative feelings corrupting his digestive processes, and throwing his sweat glands into hyperdrive just to clear the toxic buildup.
One thing any floor supervisor learned at Verge was you couldn’t afford to be high-strung. The CTWs were all high strung. They needed a management style akin to downing a fistful of Quaaludes. Which was admittedly not Johnson’s style.
“As you can see,” Bitterman said, throwing up the hologram with a swipe of his desktop which was essentially one big monitor, “I’ve figure out how to wipe Kansas off the map without anyone knowing.”
Axelman coughed out his surprise. Robots couldn’t cough, but they could emulate certain human traits to blend better. “You’re joking, right? Kind of hard to keep a thing like that under wraps.”
“Not at all. Once you lay out the devices, the area inside the circle functions kind of like the Bermuda Triangle. People can disappear while leaving the structures in-tact.”
“Where do they go?” Axelman asked tentatively, keeping as much emotion out of his voice as he could, and keeping his eyes from bugging out as best he could. He had to suppress his human-emulating algorithms on the fly. It was a bit unnerving seeing the people there one second and gone the next, even if it was just a simulation.
“It’s a time slip. Basically we swap out the Kansas population that’s there for the one from some parallel dimension. So let’s say the ones we have are rebelling against the state. Or against Corporate America. Or have all decided to go eco-terrorist on our ass after an oil spill ruins their state economy. Basically all we have to do is swap them out for a more peaceable population from another timeline. Problem solved. No one is any wiser.”
Axelman nodded. “It’s brilliant, all right. I’m not even going to ask how many technologies you had to weave together to pull off this hat trick…”
“Thirty-seven and counting. Assuming it works. If it doesn’t, might have to play time weaver a bit longer before arriving at a satisfactory conclusion. We should probably test it on some small town where no one will be missed.”
Axelman nodded. “Yes, very sensible. I think I see the problem Johnson had with this. No denying your brilliance, of course, even if he refused to acknowledge it. It’s just that it’s about ten years too late. There are no corporations any more, save for Verge, and even we’re so open-sourced and transparent that we may as well be non-profit. It was that or go the way of the dodo. He’s probably just mad because he asked for a fix from the population rising up against corporate America back when it was needed. And now, well, it’s sort of a slap in the face, isn’t it?”
He rested his hand on the CTW’s shoulder and squeezed gently but reassuringly. He was well aware that a humanik’s slightest movement brought with it sounds that conveyed the awesome power of their titanium frames and hydraulic powered muscles. And it unnerved the humans to hear them walking across the factory floor, far less to get this close to them. That meant taking extra precautions to calm them. “Tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to show him the hidden possibilities he refuses to see. Why, if you perfected this device, you could swap out the entire global population for one that is entirely sycophantic and worships their corporate benefactors. We could have that one world, run as one mega-corporation, namely Verge, that we always wanted. That would make you not just man of the hour, but man of the century.”
“Damn right!” Bitterman said, perking up.
“That’s how it is with Johnson. Not much imagination, I’m afraid. Well, what do you expect, he’s management? Those who can’t do, manage, right?”
Bitterman chuckled, wiping his snivels. “Right.”
“You have to walk him through everything. Just remember that next time. And be a better spin doctor for yourself. If one of your ideas is coming up lemons with him, show him how he can make lemonade with it. And once you realize that guy is nothing but global domination fantasies wrapped up into one tight package, it’s not terribly hard to spin most anything, just so you spin it that direction.”
“Got it. Thanks, Axelman. That talk was better than an anti-depressant, which my mindchip can’t seem to secrete fast enough whenever that guy’s around. I’ll get on with swapping out the entire world population for more docile sheep in people’s clothing.”
Axelman patted him on the back and headed for the elevator. Despite his poker face, he found these CTWs downright terrifying. Even when they were answering to Verge.
The only upside for now, at least from Axelman’s perspective, if not Verge’s, was that Bitterman didn’t score all that highly on the IQ scale for CTWs. He talked a good game, but Axelman doubted he could really pull off his idea, as promising as it was from a corporate point of view.
***
“Show me.”
The gruff gentleman addressing him was known as a humanik. He was one of many wandering the halls of Verge, short for Convergence, Inc. This one wore his skin patch along
half of his face. Others sported the human skin drafts on a leg or a section of their chest. They wore them like tattoos, far prouder of the robot bodies a complete skin suit was meant to hide. They were cyborgs that had grown weary of passing as human, since they considered most humans beneath them, and beneath contempt. They had human-plus intelligence, largely limited by how much computing power they could fit inside their crystal craniums. With mindchips on their way out and nanococktails on their way in, the race was on between the humaniks and the upgraded humans, running neck and neck for who had the bigger brains.
“I think you’ll like this one, sir,” Shakerton said, reflexively straightening his tie. Everything looked less than perfect on a human to a humanik, so best his suit was as pressed as he could make it. He’d spent some time applying some makeup to smooth out his complexion before his supervisor’s arrival to erase other obvious imperfections. But there was only so much he could do with a face this unexceptional. He gestured in the direction he wanted them to walk along the factory floor. Verge was nothing but factor floors rising from the ground a hundred stories into the sky and a hundred more below ground. They were currently on the thirty-seventh floor above ground. Shakerton had no idea what went on on the other floors, other than they were all one convergence-tech project or another.
Shakerton, at 6’ 4”, was just a couple inches shorter than the humanik. The squared off shoulders of his suit gave him an extra inch to either side which he appreciated as it narrowed the gap between his frame and the humanik’s. He pointed to the giant rollers spitting out sheets of flexiscreen that could be rolled up like paper and rolled out in the form of flat screen TVs, animated billboards, newspapers, magazines, store window posters, marquis… Basically they could stream information from the internet on any surface you wanted twenty-four seven, all keyed to the customer or customers walking by. The passersby had their cell phones, their mindchips, the nano-nets, as the case may be, connected to the internet, meaning their profiles were on line so the streaming flexi-material just projected what was uppermost in their minds at the time, the desires most in need of fulfilling. If one approach didn’t work to push the consumer off the fence of buy or don’t buy, then another one would be tried the next time he or she passed another flexiscreen.
Convergence_ The Time Weavers Page 3
