She was stretching the loose skin against her neck now with her thumb and index finger like a rubber band and letting it smack back into place.
“Thank you,” Ethan said. “Most people who don’t like me aren’t anywhere near as helpful.”
“Really? I would think they’d be happy to help you get over yourself.” She marched off to examine her next body without giving him a second thought.
He, on the other hand, was having plenty of second thoughts. Mostly about the kind of people who would be in any position to flip over the Pancake Man’s world view, pardon the expression. Suddenly his suspect pool didn’t look quite so deep.
ELEVEN
The Uber-Ferrari slowed in front of the Pentagon. Monica rolled out and into a combat-ready stance before the vehicle came to a full stop. The Ferrari AI sighed. “Drama Queen.” And sped off. Uber didn’t want any more to do with what she had in mind.
Guards were running her way, armed to the teeth. Snipers were already taking shots at her from rooftops and high-story windows. She’d already sicced numerous self-evolving algorithms on the whole lot of them long before getting out of the car. She kept dodging the sniper rifles with her faster-than-thou reflexes courtesy of her latest nano. But the snipers weren’t foolish. Soon they’d anticipate her duck and cover moves and send the bullets flying accordingly.
Her self-evolving specialty AIs were already drilling into the soldiers with assault rifles, jamming their smart-weapons, or worse, hacking their mindchips and turning the soldiers on one another. The battlefield hadn’t seen this many people down in so little time in close combat since the civil war. She wasn’t particularly concerned. Technically it wasn’t murder if the medical nano they were all infused with got them up and running again within a few hours, possibly even minutes. She wasn’t exactly sure what improvements military grade medical nano had over what was available to civilians, but it had to be more impressive by several magnitudes. None of those advances would really be possible in 2025—as opposed to say 2050—absent the self-evolving nanites that evolved strictly according to performing their own tasks better with never a thought as to straying from that task. Specialty AIs they were called. And most every miracle traced back to them. You couldn’t find a sentient AGI cycling through cyberspace if you tried, though the tech was readily available. Just that no one was quite ready to let those genies out of the bottle. Specialty AIs hunted them down ruthlessly and exterminated them whenever some well-meaning hacker decided to release one on the world.
Her snipers’ minds hadn’t been so easy to hack. Better grade mindchips in keeping with being higher value targets. But thanks to the IOT, or rather the latest version of the Internet of Things, it wasn’t terribly hard to harass them with quadcopter and bat-wing drones, peppering them with machine gun fire of their own. If it weren’t for recent internet upgrades, she wouldn’t have the bandwidth at her disposal to do what she was doing. The drones had been en route to children and adults alike as gifts. When, surprise, they flew out of their boxes in transit by way of the UPS dirigibles and flew to their new targets. En route they had their rubber bullets replaced with real ones with in-flight re-armoring” thanks to other drones, which Monica had also hacked. Luckily for her, her mindchip could handle countless missions at once enfolded within her larger mission, often with little more than imagining what she wanted to accomplish and letting it handle attention to the small details, like swapping out rubber bullets for the real ones midair.
The grass she was walking on morphed, hardening and sharpening its edges until it cut through her boots and flesh like acupuncture needles. Clearly not the kind meant to chill her out. Monica adjusted her base gravity by hollowing out her cells, turning her body into an aerogel version of its former self with the aid of her rocket-fast nervous system, the product of another upgrade, and her nanites associated with body-morphing. Granted, these weren’t exactly off-the-shelf abilities. She’d introduced her own self-evolving algorithms, building on what each nanococktail could do inside her body. This particular off-the-shelf mix was initially supposed to add strength and flexibility, not help her pull off levitation tricks by suddenly making her lighter than air. But what was a girl with a mindchip to do with all that idle CPU time? But dialogue with the nanites in her body, open up more neural connections, and get it to be more responsive to the chip itself. For starters. She knew she was overcompensating. She couldn’t be the Convergence Tech wizard she’d always wanted to be. The only kind of people who really mattered anymore.
But she could hunt them down, the criminals among them anyway, hope some of their magic rubbed off on her by osmosis. And in the meantime, she could learn to do more with less. Sometimes the most gifted Convergence Tech wizard was not always the most successful. When Feynman, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, was asked how he went toe to toe with other giants in his field, weighing in with much higher IQs to his comparatively humble 125, he told them, he couldn’t afford to be lazy. A higher IQ type would see the way through a maze instantly and put the paper down. Feynman, on the other hand, had to keep trying new routes until he found a way through. And in the process found far better ways than the lazy thinker would have ever found. His way of saying he was a divergent thinker more than a convergent one. His inspirational words had become Monica’s mantra ever since, when contemplating her own makeovers.
Only one problem with walking on air. Come time to kick some ass, she was going to be seriously impaired. She started yanking limbs off of fallen soldiers and taking bites out of them. Her nanites needed raw material to resolidify her. It wasn’t like she was pursuing cannibalism as anything but a means to an ends. That made it not so bad, right?
By the time she got to the front doors, she was solid enough to kick them not only open, but off their hinges.
On the other side was a solid wall of soldiers with rifles, all aimed at her. They didn’t hesitate with blowing her to hell.
Monica jumped up to the second story and ran away from their line of fire. By then she had several hundred bullets inside her. Some had passed through, mercifully, so those holes would be all the easier to heal. Her off-the-shelf medical nano really wasn’t up to this. But she’d hacked the soldier’s medical nano before entering the building. To be more specific, her medical nano had, with the help of her mindchip to open the communications channel. The rest was just self-evolving algorithms doing their thing, evolving at a mile a minute, now that they were being cued as to exactly what “nextgen medical nano” looked like.
Half way to her father’s office the bullets were dropping like dead flees off a dog.
By the time she kicked his door open, the bullets that had turned her into Swiss Cheese were but a distant memory. Her father, in his three-Star general’s uniform, turned away from the monitor showing her highlight reel approaching the pentagon and busting past inside security. He swiveled his chair toward her. Age had taken his oversized frame and whittled it some, she noted. He still looked larger than life to her sitting there, and she imagined would to most people. His broad jaw and forehead lending him a carved-from granite quality, even now, very appropriate for his personality. She could remember hitting her hard head against his even harder head many a time. “Monica, what did I tell you about overcompensating? Not everyone gets to be a Convergence Tech wizard. There is such a thing as life after failed dreams.”
“Spoken by someone still heartbroken he never got to give Patton a run for his money storming over China because stomping the bastards into oblivion would just mean billions less consumers for our own products. And the ones who survived sure wouldn’t need any more motivation to give us a dose of our own medicine.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said gesturing for her to take a seat. “The military is never going to stop coming after you after today.” He reached into his pocket and handed her his bottle of No-Sleep. “The least I can do. Don’t say I never gave you anything.”
“I have a Pancake Man who did a full
gainer off his balcony window. Someone hacked into his mind and compelled him to do it. At the time he was working on something known as The Genesis Project.” Her avatar had reported Ethan’s findings to her wirelessly some hours ago. “Apparently you can use it to do a nano makeover of an entire planet in a matter of hours. You can imagine the implications.”
“Yes,” he said, sitting up in his chair. Suddenly he wasn’t weary of her presence any more. He was on high alert. “With our space-warping engines—which, by the way, don’t exist if anybody asks—we could make the entire universe, hell the multiverse, one gigantic mindnet, nothing but interconnected mindspace, every speck of solid matter converted into a sentient version of its former self. It’s the Holy Grail, girl! Getting there before anyone else, I mean. Building the mind of God, I mean.” His eyes refocused on her. “You trying to tell me someone figured out how to do this and we killed him?”
“That’s what I want to know.”
The General shook his head. “Not me, little girl. And not the pentagon. If we knew about him he’d be under lock and key with more protection than the president. And if he was defecting to someone else, I wouldn’t have thrown him out a window. I’d have bombed the city into the Stone Age to keep him from transmitting what he knew to the other side with his dying breath. We don’t exactly do surgical strikes in this office. We specialize in overkill.”
She hated to admit it, but her father was talking sense. He wasn’t beyond lying to her, but his logic made more sense than any truth he might be sheltering from her.
“You understand we’ve been experimenting with this idea for some time, in secret, of course?” the general said. “The reaction is highly unstable. It’s highly possible he was a victim to the nanite hive mind, deciding to devour him for food stock, or run amuck in countless different ways. And I don’t use the word ‘countless’ lightly. What is it Ben Franklin said, ‘I haven’t failed. I’ve just found a thousand and one ways that don’t work.’ Trust me, I feel him on this.”
She stood up. “Then I guess our little father daughter reunion is over. Unless you wish to spill military secrets to me that will aid my investigation.”
“Talk about emotional blackmail.” He sighed. “I’m afraid you’re on your own.”
She turned her back on him and sauntered toward the door.
“Just so you know, if you do survive the military onslaught coming your way, they’ll lock you in a basement somewhere and start dissecting you. So win or lose the skirmishes ahead, I’m not liking your future.”
She turned back to face him. “I may be a failed Convergence Tech Wizard. But you’re a failed three star general. Nothing would give you more pride than knowing I managed to outmaneuver the best the pentagon had to throw at me. Looks like we’re both living vicariously from here on out.”
He smiled and rocked back on his chair. “Remind me not to be so transparent. It’s not a good look on a general.”
TWELVE
Noah stared hypnotized at the 3D printed girl his father had made for him, still lying supine in the incubator. She had long hair of spun gold that rolled off her in tight curls. Her skin so smooth and perfect no human could hope to match it. Just lying there, she made real life look like a cheap imitation of whatever world she came from. She was maybe 5’10”. He’d know better when she was standing. Meaning she’d be 6’ in heels. Close to his height. This all but guaranteed he wouldn’t give her a stiff neck during all those prolonged kisses he was imagining. It was a practical consideration that just had to be gotten out of the way. He held her hand through the glass wall of the cylindrical tube, only the glove coming between him and her to ensure nothing in the tube got out and nothing outside the tube got in. He suddenly became conscious of his father breathing over his shoulder. When had he entered the room? It was as if when Synthia—the name Noah had given the synthetic girl—was around, no one else existed. He lost track of time and place altogether.
“I see you’ve moved on to very age-appropriate heavy-hand holding,” his father said.
“With a corpse, Dad. Not sure how age-appropriate that is. I’ve discovered a distinct passion for necrophilia sitting here. The more fantasies go through my head about making it with her comatose body, the less likely I’m ever to be normal again.”
“Nonsense. Now, that’s love for you.” Jarod chuckled at his own joke.
Noah clutched Synthia’s hand tighter in hopes that it would push his father out of the picture once again. The alarm rang on the incubator. “What’s that sound?! Tell me she’s all right.”
“Relax, just means the shake and bake job is ready to be taken out of the oven.”
“In olden times I’d slap you across the face with a glove for that comment, and we’d proceed to the front lawn for our duel. I’d shoot you dead and feel very smug about it.”
Jarod sighed. “I thought I forbade you to read from history. It’ll just give you nightmares. The future is the only hope for any of us.”
“The future is what gives me nightmares.” He was about to tell his father to get to hell out and stop ruining his moment when Synthia opened her eyes and panned her head over to Noah. “You’re very attractive,” she said.
Noah was taken back but regrouped quickly. He stopped stammering and said, “Yes, you worship me as your god and live to do fellatio on me.”
She smiled generously but somewhat condescendingly. “You’re trying to brainwash a supersentient lifeform by twitching your eyes and not blinking?”
His father laughed. “God, she’s worse than your mother. She could slay the beast in me with just one line too. Good luck with that one.” He patted his son on the back and exited the room.
“Help me out of this coffin,” she said. “I’ve been buried alive long enough.”
Noah jumped to, pulling the top up on the cylinder along the line that bisected it. He lifted her out, carried her across the threshold into the adjoining room in their basement, and set her down on one of the stools at the workbench where his father had all sorts of gadgets in various states of ill-repair. “Is that what it felt like for you,” he said, “being buried alive?”
She nodded stiffly, giving him a pained smile. “I’ve been conscious for some time, but the mindchip and the nano wouldn’t release me entirely into the waking world until it felt like their work was sufficiently advanced. In order to take things to the next stage they had to grant me movement. It was like experiencing locked-in syndrome up until this moment.”
“That sucks.” He took a deep breath and let it out.
She aped his action, taking a deep breath and letting it out. “Thanks for cuing me to take my first breath. I suppose it is only now that I’m truly born into this life.”
“You weren’t breathing this whole time? So how then were you talking?”
“I was moving my lips and making you both hear what I wanted you to hear.”
He smiled incredulously. “But my father and I don’t have mindchips, or nanococktails circulating in our systems for you to hack.”
She smiled generously and with empathy. “You were both close enough for me to hack the EMF signals coming off your head. The brain, even an unupgraded one, is much like a radio, giving off and receiving electronic signals.”
He smiled painfully. “I suppose for you it’s like waking up to find that the monkeys are in charge of the zoo and the humans are the ones in cages.”
She smiled so warmly he thought his heart would melt. She had a smile for each emotion. It was driving him wild and making his dick hard. He’d always felt safe and secure around his father, and generally happy. They had their moments when they made each other laugh, and there was plenty of love in their household despite all the ribbing of one another. But she’d made him smile in response to her smiles more in the last couple minutes than he remembered doing in the last couple weeks. His face muscles were actually feeling sore.
“It’s nothing like that. You have lovely minds, both of you. I’m not sure mine is
much different. It’s just that…” She lowered her eyes; Noah thought he sensed shame.
“Just what?”
“Just that I imagine I don’t have to work as hard as you to overcome hurdles. It’s not fair, really. I wonder if I’ll always feel like a cheat.”
“You’ll find bigger hurdles to overcome in the same amount of time so you know the joy of coming up against your own limits and pushing beyond them, just like we do. They’ll just be different limits, that’s all.”
She looked up, smiling, tears running down her cheeks. “Thanks for that, you’re very kind.”
He stammered again, and lowered his eyes self-consciously.
“You have trouble keeping thoughts of making love to me out of your mind, don’t you?”
“Oh Techa! Oh Techa!” He was off the stool and pacing and pulling at his hair. “You have to stop doing that, coming into people’s minds unannounced! We humans need our secrets.”
“We humans? You don’t consider me human.”
“You’re transhuman. You’re what comes next. And if it makes you feel any better, you’re not alone. We’re the ones who are the dying breed.”
She smiled. “It’s okay, about your thoughts I mean. I find them calming, comforting.”
“Honestly, I’d rather you be driven out of your mind with desire.”
“You’re more of a slave to your primitive nervous system and your hormones than I am. I can teach you…”
Convergence_ The Time Weavers Page 7
