“I think you’ll find we humans are far more interested in dragging you down to our level than in elevating ourselves to yours.”
“Hmm, I can see I’ve made you uncomfortable. Would you like to have sex? Maybe it’ll relax you the way it does me.”
“It’s not medicine!”
Her eyes went up and to the side. “Then why are sex therapists making such a bundle?”
“Stop searching the internet for answers that should come naturally. Techa this is weird! This is not how I expected things to go at all.”
“You’re a bit confusing to read, if that helps.”
He sighed. “Yes, it does. Thank Techa, even guys need a sense of mystery.” It suddenly dawned on him. He stopped his pacing. “What do you mean?”
“You’re riding an emotional roller coaster but your dick is as hard as ever.”
“Ahhh! Do you know anything about fourteen year old physiology? Feel free to search the internet on that one.” Mumbling, he added, “though technically I’m almost fifteen.”
***
Jarod had been monitoring Noah and Synthia since he left the room. He was very curious as to how she would perform right out of the starting gate. But he wanted to observe his son and her together. She’d been created as a mate for him, after all. How well they got along was an indirect indicator of how she might be doing with her other tasks. Initial indicators weren’t exactly encouraging. He got up from the adjoining room to the one they were in in the basement and reinserted himself into their little drama.
“Forgive me for interrupting, kids,” he said, stepping into the room.
“It’s a most welcome interruption, trust me,” Noah said. “Your first welcomed interruption in almost fifteen years, by the way. Congrats for finally hitting it out of the ballpark.”
The floor of the chamber was concrete as were the walls, explaining the feeling of damp and coldness. Much of the basement felt unfinished, especially in these side rooms that he came to tinker mostly to get away from his main projects when he felt stymied. “Why don’t we step outside? The sun is shining, and life seems far more worth living outside of these dungeon walls.”
“Yes, I think the sun and warmth will do him good,” Synthia said.
“Do me good!”
“There are monarch and tiger swallowtail butterflies flittering about. You’ve built a lovely butterfly garden, Jarod.”
“How…?” Noah said, furrowing his brows.
“She hacked the security cameras about the house,” Jarod said, nodding. “Nice. I was afraid with how you were interacting with Noah that you might be too busted to do that.”
“We can’t just take her outside for the whole world to see!” Noah balked.
“Your father has created a faraday cage about the yard. There are no sight lines where anyone can see in. No chance of fly-over drones, or even satellites. He’s managed to put you entirely off-grid without anyone noticing the pin-prick black hole that devours all surveillance efforts. Very impressive for an unupgraded mind.”
“Yes, we’re very progressive Neanderthals, thank you very much.” Noah stormed up the stairs. “Well, what are you waiting for!” he shouted down the stairs. “The sun is shining, the wind is blowing, and it’s a brand new day!”
“Don’t mind him, Jarod,” Synthia said. “He’s just feeling sexually frustrated right now. I think he’s in love with me and doesn’t know what to do about it.”
He rested his hand on her shoulder. “I thought you might help him with that. It’s partly why I built you.”
“Oh, I will. It’s just fun making him pop his cork every few seconds like one of those wind-up jack-in-the-box toys you had as a kid.”
He suppressed a laugh; it came out more like a snort. “Well, I’m not sure how high you’ll score on your transhuman tests, but there’s no doubting you’re all too human.”
***
Jarod had to admit he’d let the yard go to hell. It was a plot of several acres that needed ferocious, ongoing attention, and he could just never be bothered. It had been enough of a project to create the faraday grid around it. Thousands of embedded micro-devices in the ground, in the trees, at various heights, all the way up to the canopies. He had been younger then, with more energy to entertain his madness. If he had to contemplate such an undertaking now, in his sixties, he wouldn’t have bothered.
He was closer to being Noah’s grandfather than his father. He cursed the decision his wife and he had made to have children later in life. But who would have known she would die so young, of natural causes, no less? Fortunately, his own health remained pretty good. He was as lean as any thirty-year old, mostly due to a high metabolism. Even the Parkinson’s wasn’t drawing too much attention to itself, except, of course, when he needed it to be out of the way most, working on his experiments. His dementia wasn’t too bad yet, with lapses few and far between.
On the plus side vis-à-vis what he could and couldn’t do anymore, Synthia was right, the butterfly garden had blossomed on its own, virtually thriving on neglect. The rest of the nature-gone-wild look probably benefitted the butterflies as well, providing them numerous places to spawn. They were landing on the two kids and even on him as the sweat beaded up on them in the moist, hot air, to stick their tendrils in the beads of water. The tickling of their legs was the first tactile sensation he could remember drawing his attention in a long while other than the tremors that welled up from inside him from time to time.
“Okay, kid, show me what you’re made of,” Jarod said, squeezing Synthia’s shoulder.
“She’s not some dog, you can make do tricks, Dad,” Noah said.
Synthia and Jarod chuckled at his expense, reprising their in-joke of earlier. “It’s okay,” she said. “You mind if I get you to do some tricks, Noah?”
He gave a sour look to the two of them, translating their in-joke for himself. “Unless I miss my guess, it’s not the first time you’ve gotten me to roll over for you. I’m still awaiting my treat from the last few times.” He folded his arms defensively.
She held out hers. And he drifted off the ground. He unfolded his arms.
“Whoa!” he said, his mouth sounding suddenly dry.
“Enjoy your ride, Noah!” Synthia said before sending him flying about the yard, every which way.
He would disappear from sight for a while and they’d hear him whooping it up and laughing, and occasionally, “Techa be praised!”
“How are you doing this?” Jarod asked Synthia, unable to take his eyes off his flying superhero son, sans the costume.
“I hacked your faraday cage. Evolved the thirty-five hundred devices you implanted around the yard.”
“You’ve suspended gravity somehow,” Jarod said, trying to figure out her game. “He’s not so much flying as floating.”
“Yes.”
“But that would require exquisite tuning of the anti-gravity field. Kind of, well, kind of like what we believe alien spaceship technology to be capable of, if you believe in UFO sightings, and Area 51. Not to mention secret warehouses full of nextgen technologies that we invented or reverse-engineered long ago, and just decided to keep off the market for the sake of stabilizing the economy, and for the one percent holding on to control.”
She laughed. “That’s all true, you know. I was able to hack into those compounds and their databases. But I didn’t need to steal their secret knowledge for something as basic as creating an anti-gravity field.”
Jarod swallowed hard. “Higher! Higher!” he heard his son squeal in the distance. “Faster! Faster!” He allowed himself the strangely calming sight of seeing his son flying about, doing even more harrowing maneuvers, all so he could distract his mind from even more troubling questions. Finally, the shock therapy working, he said, “Just how far are you with evolving the three-way synthesis of technologies we used to create you?”
“It’s perhaps for the best I don’t answer that, Jarod. Even faraday cages can be hacked. They haven’t gotten throu
gh yet, but they might, and it would be easy enough to get inside your head to get at the truth, even if they would have a real challenge getting inside my head.”
His son landed in front of them, or rather she landed him. “Whoa!” he said. He looked at Synthia with a dumb smile on his face. “Seems like when you’re not making me smile, you’re making me say ‘Whoa!’ a lot.”
“And blow your top and pace on command and go ‘boing’ in your crotch. You must be proud of all the tricks you’ve learned in such a short time,” Synthia said.
“Bow wow,” he said with a smile, not taking offense this time.
“She’s ready, son. She’s more than ready,” Jarod said. “Our liberation as a race from the tyranny of the top one percent is finally upon us. There’ll be no keeping us down now.”
“No way!” Jarod squawked. “We’ve barely run one test!”
“She’s surpassed my wildest expectations. If she can do this on her first day, imagine what she’ll be able to do on her second day.”
“I’m afraid your son’s correct, Jarod,” Synthia said.
“You can’t possibly believe that!” Jarod stammered.
“It’s a poor strategic move to show your hand like that. Not without knowing what the enemy is capable of. You can bet the technologies in play for countering enterprising upstarts like yourself are many. We need to find out what they can do to stop us without showing our hand.”
Jarod made a throat clearing sound. “What do you suggest?”
“I can hack the minds of some people with mindchips and nanococktails both. They won’t be as technologically well-endowed as what the military has access to, and what corporations are keeping locked in their vaults, but it will be enough.”
“Enough to draw the authorities out,” his son said nodding.
“And for you to upgrade the test group on the fly,” Jarod interjected, “a little bit at a time, just so you can see what the enemy’s limits are when they come to shut them down.”
“Best of all,” Synthia said, “we can test the group mind power you’re so curious about. To see how many interlinked minds it takes to provide an adequate defense against Big Brother.”
Jarod smiled. “I like it.”
“You got my father to rein in his impatience. I haven’t been able to achieve that yet,” Noah said.
Synthia smiled a smile that was not condescending, but that validated the value of their growing alliance. Jarod noticed that she could communicate quite a lot with a smile. She had as many of them as the human language seemed to have words.
“So when do we initiate the first wave of tests?” Jarod asked.
Noah frowned. “Looks like I spoke too soon.”
“Right now, of course.”
Noah squawked at her, “You’re such an enabler! I can’t believe you’d betray our sacred trust to teach my father an ounce of patience before he brings the world crashing down on our heads!”
“Is he always such a drama queen?”
Jarod frowned. “For the record, that’s his mother’s influence.”
THIRTEEN
Monica knocked on Ethan’s door. To her surprise, he managed to find his way to her on his own without additional prompting. Perhaps he was out of liquor. Ethan opened the door and she said, “You might want to reconsider this whole boyfriend-girlfriend thing in light of what I just did.”
“Nothing could make me reconsider.”
“I hacked the pentagon, stormed the building, and threatened my father, the three star general.”
“You’re right. It really wasn’t working out.” He slammed the door in her face.
She bit her lip to restrain a smile and tears both. He was prone to histrionics. What’s more, she was convinced she could turn him around. She kicked his door in. “Really, Ethan? That’s the extent of your love? To run at the first sign of a little hardship?” She was advancing on him as she was talking for dramatic emphasis.
“A little hardship is, ‘Where did you hide my bottle of Jack Daniels?’ Not…” he turned toward the window as something caught the corner of his eye. It was a stinger missile coming straight for them.
It tore through the window like butter and landed in the couch. “Not stinger missiles up my ass!” Ethan gestured at the couch.
“I diffused it before it got to us. What more do you want? You’re too ‘cup half empty.’ That’s been your problem all along.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t do high maintenance relationships, okay. And you couldn’t be more high maintenance if you tried. Close the door on your way out, work your healing magic on it, and apologize to it for me. I don’t need any traumatized doors refusing to open on me because I refused to consider their feelings.”
“What about my feelings!”
“To get around to your feelings I have to get past all the insanity first. I’m just not smart enough. Maybe you should be dating a transhuman!”
She sighed. “I thought you understood that I was going to the Pentagon to do whatever it takes to get on my father’s radar.”
“I thought that meant you’d go stand in the lobby and strip naked! That would get me to come running! Not launch a nuclear attack on the pentagon!”
“Just lasers, bullets, and cyberwarfare. Don’t go making this more than it is.”
“That’s it! I’m erasing you from memory.” He went over, grabbed the missile, and launched it out the window, where it promptly pierced the convertible roof of the Uber convertible Maserati. “Damn, thank Techa I didn’t damage the car.”
“I’ll give you the keys. Let you drive.”
“Really?” He pulled himself together. “Stop distracting me from the fact that my life is all over if I stay with you a moment longer!”
“I distinctly remember you saying my life would be over if I went through with my plans. Now you’re acting like you yourself didn’t predict the fall out.”
“I was sort of joking then. Repercussions were still a rather abstract idea, before a missile came whizzing through my window making things a good deal more concrete!”
“Just take a deep breath, Ethan.” She threw him the keys. “If there’s any car that can outrun a stinger missile…”
“You’re right. All I needed to marshal my emotions was a little context.” He stormed toward the door. When he got there he said to the door, “Ah, be mad at her, okay? I can’t take any more people being mad at me right now.”
He marched himself downstairs and right into the Maserati, throwing the missile out the side window. Monica watched him off his balcony. Sighed. “How do I tell him the car is rigged to explode?” She shook her head slowly. “Baby steps, Monica, baby steps.”
“Hold on,” she said arriving at the Maserati’s passenger side door, seeing him turning the ignition. “Need to detach the bomb first.”
His eyes went wide and he froze. “By all means,” he said hoarsely.
She reached under the undercarriage, yanked it out, and handed it to one of the apartment-complex kids that happened to be sauntering by. “A project for science class.”
“What is it?” the kid asked.
“A bomb.”
“Cool.” He nodded and walked away with it towards his apartment.
“Please tell me you disarmed that thing,” Ethan said as she crawled into the car.
“It’s the neighbor that blasts heavy metal the livelong day.”
“And suddenly my child advocacy isn’t what it once was.” He turned the engine over. “Just give me time to drive out of the blast radius.”
They had been headed up the freeway a while with him giving her looks. Her hair whipping in her face from the wind breezing through the convertible didn’t do much to mute her expressions. Finally, she caved, “No, Ethan, I really did not give a kid a live bomb to play with.”
“I knew that. I was just admiring how well your hair holds up under hundred mile an hour winds.” He was referring to the speed at which he was driving the car.
“Maybe if
you didn’t talk for a while. We’re under attack and I don’t want to be distracted by one of your jokes. My ability to multitask is good, I’m just not looking to put it to the test today any more than I have to.”
He made an “I’m zippering it” gesture with his hand over his lips. And started checking the rearview and side-view mirrors to see what she was talking about.
Monica pressed the button on the Maserati top which started closing up. Same with the windows. “What’s with cocooning us?” Ethan said.
“That bug that just splattered against the windshield. It’s a robot.”
“I thought it went out with more of a bang than a whimper.”
“That’s because it’s a flying bomb. Meant to burrow in by way of an ear canal, your mouth…” She glanced at his crotch. “Any orifice it can find.”
He put his hands to his ears. Glanced at his crotch. And proceeded to try and reach it with his lips.
“You’re seriously going to try and give yourself fellatio in a car moving in excess of a hundred miles an hour?”
“I assure you I’ve never been more motivated to explore creative masturbation options.”
“Relax, I sprang for the diplomatic upgrades on the Uber rental this time. Car is bulletproof and bombproof.”
He eased up on bobbing his head between his chest and his crotch. Rubbed the back of my neck. “I’m desisting only because I was never going to make it anyway. Not in a million years. Not because I find your words the least bit assuaging.” He glanced out the side view mirrors. “What the hell is that?” He watched as camouflaged ATVs sped towards them. Not liking the traction they were getting in the boggy landscape, saturated with rain, they morphed into human form—as human as you could get anyway when your day job is a troop transport—and bounded after them with far greater ease. “Oh, yeah, technological progress is a good thing. Go ahead and say it. I want to hear you say it.”
She strangled a grin and said, evenly, “I see why you drink now. You have an excitable nature, and it’s just a tranquilizer. The nasty habit seems more forgivable under the circumstances.”
Convergence_ The Time Weavers Page 8
