Lucky for him, a little voice in back of his head had warned him this day was coming. It wasn’t his higher self, as he first thought. It wasn’t a schizophrenic break either. It was a girl by the name of Synthia. And he was group-mind connected with her along with several others throughout the county. Together they would fight. And together they would win. With any luck anyway. The little girl made no effort to be misleading. “We’ll just have to see if the group mind is strong enough to resist whatever they throw at us. We won’t know for sure, because as sure as I’m whispering in your ear, we won’t know just what they have to throw at us until they start lobbing.”
He could feel the presence of the others, and of the little girl. What his wife described as headaches, he knew to be something more. According to the little girl, their ability to read one another’s minds would improve with the work she was doing, and would improve under pressure as well, benefitting from the adrenaline spikes, and the fight-or-flight responses, the body’s other hormonal surges. From what his gut was telling him, those nanites in his brain linking him to the others in the group mind were about to get plenty of help from his fight or flight response, not just some, but a lot.
FIFTEEN
Orion ordered Proto, the Robot Tractor cum Landscaper, back to the house. Proto morphed himself around the home as a defensive shield.
Orion had to bring up the image of the outside via the internet as Proto was now blocking his view to the property. The robot soldiers were emptying out of the ATVs, fanning out across the miniature golf course that Proto had built around Orion’s and his wife’s land. The droids were modeled on humans but were all chrome metal, about seven feet tall. They were all packing automatic weapons or something heavier, such as grenade launchers. If this was all they had to throw at Orion and his household, they might just make out okay.
***
Droid, model number, X7-15 was scanning the miniature golf course for hidden mines, hidden soldiers, dead fall traps, when he felt two hooks grab hold of him. The lines attached to them pulled him in to the castle moat. The smart-water hardened around him. Whatever the mix was, it was too strong; he may as well be a bug encased in amber. He felt the resin-like substance seeping into his brainpan. His transistors and conduits slowing. As he felt his brain shutting down he could swear he could trace the last electron coursing to his voice box. But the scream would never leave his mouth. All those mechanisms had already frozen up. He derided the insane impulse of the rogue electron as he lost consciousness.
***
The first droid to reach the sandpit realized it was more than a trap for golf balls. In response to the proper stimulus, the smart sand became a quicksand pit. The X7-16 sent out a call for help that was achingly like an infant’s cry. The other droids, learning from his mistake, changed their feet to hovercraft mode, airlifting themselves over the sand pit, and ignoring their fallen chum.
The droids making their way through the pine trees found the needles from the branches snaking into their joints. The little robo-snakes wrapped around synthetic ligaments until they scissored through them. The droids didn’t just fall incapacitated, they fell in pieces, like pine cones shed by the trees themselves.
The yawning mouths of caves and windmills meant to receive golf balls and spit them out somewhere else on the green acted like powerful hoover vacuums, sucking in soldiers foolish enough to march in front of them. By the time the droids were spit out the other end, they were trash-compacted into bowling balls.
The rest of the droids learned too quickly from their fallen mates how to avoid the smart-alecky traps Orion had set for them. Never mind each of the traps required technical wizardry to procure that would have impressed DARPA. That forced the AI overseeing the gamesmanship of the field, assessing player’s skill levels and adjusting accordingly to play its “when all else fails” card.
The entire field started vibrating, just violently enough to challenge even the gyro stabilizers on the droids. Then the land pulled apart in one massive “earthquake” caused by the subterranean hydraulics. The “canyons” opened up by the breaks in the ground were more than just passive pits waiting to be crawled out of. The last of the robots found themselves being mashed into scrap by the jaws of death opening and closing on both sides of them. Orion had found inspiration for the idea from the elaborate Cirque Du Soleil stage, used for circus performances to assist the acrobats. It too was powered by elaborate hydraulics.
***
“I think that’s the last of the droids,” Orion said, passing his hand over the hologram, rotating it to see the field around the house from different angles, not just panorama mode. “I think the worst of the onslaught is behind us.”
His wife standing beside him said, “Trust me, the worst is always ahead of us. If you were Jewish, you’d know this.”
“I thought you were gypsy!”
“I can’t be a gypsy Jew, you anti-Semitic pig!”
“Calm down,” Orion said. “It’s time you accepted you have a warped perspective on reality secondary to childhood trauma or outdated memes, Techa alone knows.”
The ATVs that brought the soldiers morphed into giant human-in-outline-if-nothing-else robots, every bit a match for the robot tractor, Proto, currently protecting their home. “Okay, maybe I’m the one with the warped perspective owing to outdated memes circulating through my head,” Orion said, seeing what was transpiring on the holo-monitor.
The giants blasted at the house, using their arms that had morphed into bazookas, laser cannons, and flame throwers. So much for the “soundproof” barrier that was Proto himself. Even with the noise-dampening, these were the kinds of audio anomalies that drove people out of their bodies and made them inclined to float around the room in what were fondly referred to as near-death experiences. A vase flew off one of the small tables and shattered against the tile floor. Prayer plants in the atrium folded up and the fish in the aquarium darted for cover.
Orion felt his forehead so hot against the back of his hand he thought he’d scalded himself. A cold trickle of sweat snaked down the back of his spine. His expanding lungs fought it out with his chest muscles as if he were doing a bench press. Why now, of all times, his mind chose to showcase meaningless and distracting physical sensations, he couldn’t say. Perhaps it was just his desire to escape the moment in some way.
The latest blast against Proto’s protective hull rang his bell so hard, that Orion felt his own brain sloshing against his skull.
Proto was holding his own for now, rotating his own weaponry into position and firing back, courtesy of his onboard 3D printers that could be repositioned as needed. Better yet, the 3D printers could use the material they were being blasted with as fuel for forging new weaponry and ammunition. Orion had made some upgrades of his own to Proto’s already impressive versatility. Even with all Proto could do, he was outnumbered, and outgunned. “We can’t take much more of this,” Orion said, feeling the ground shake and observing the cracks propagating through the tile floor.
“Show me the blow ups on the ATV-morphs he’s up against,” his wife said.
Orion threw up their diagrams on the holo, then blew apart their integrated frames into base components prior to assembly.
“There, that’s the weak point on that one,” his wife said.
“How do you know?”
“This is the military. That means they cut corners where they can. All you have to know is where to find the weak link. One thing I know is value. Trust me, that’s the cheapest component.”
“What does cheap mean in this context?”
“It won’t hold up to acid corrosion as well as the other parts.”
Orion passed the intel on to Proto. His nano-infused neural web handled the transmission of the ATV-morphs’ diagrams stored on Orion’s mindchip, along with suggested targeting.
Proto squirted acid at the component he was asked to target. The corrosive, working its way through the ATV-Morph’s innards, caused it to lose control, spas
tically fire off its arsenal wildly in all directions, one of the blasts catching a fellow ATV-Morph. It wasn’t enough to take out his partner, just piss him off. It growled like some bear that had no intention of having its territory encroached upon.
“Show me that one,” the wife said, pointing at another model of ATV-Morph.
Orion repeated the trick with the blow up diagrams. Once again his wife pointed to the area for targeting. “The cabling they used for tendons for this one won’t take heat above twenty-five hundred degrees Fahrenheit.”
All Orion could think was when the fruits and vegetables they’d been eating upgraded his wife, the nano-upgrade and her mindchip upgrade must have evolved in keeping with her more frugal sensibilities. In truth, Orion had always considered it a kind of superpower; she could walk through a flea market and pick out stuff of value that everyone else had missed. The five dollar item that was really worth several hundred or more.
Proto used one of his on-board 3D printers to procure the necessary flammable liquid that would burn at the desired temperature and then squirted it at the target he had had highlighted for him. One more ATV-morph down. Its death cries doubling well as sonic weapons.
The other ATV-morphs must have sensed what was going on. They didn’t stay to play a game of Last Man Standing. They folded back into ATV mode and wheeled off on three or more axles, depending on the model. Their stealth features damaged, they made a hell of a lot more ruckus on departure than on arrival.
“We did it!” Orion exclaimed excitedly, fist pumping the sky and jumping up and down.
His wife shared none of his excitement. If anything, she looked ready to take his head off. “You did something to get us on their radar. What was it?”
Orion sobered instantly, swallowed hard. “Why me? It could have been anyone in the county subject to theirs or someone else’s experiment.”
“No doubt you weren’t the only fool to make his presence known. The rest of that convoy that wheeled by earlier had to be en route to somewhere. I’m just interested in what you did.”
Orion thought about it. “I created a VPN to do my thinking on-line. So I could access the cloud. All the data trafficking is quantum encoded across the Virtual Private Network. It’s not like I left myself wide open for hacking.”
“So then, someone, the military, or Verge has a quantum encryption key they don’t want anyone to know about.”
“I’ll see what I can do to plug the hole.”
She lowered her eyes as something flashed across her face. She marched back toward the house from the atrium, her heels drumming against the tile. “Where are you off to?” Orion asked.
“Now that I know what my gift is, I have to figure out other ways to apply it. They won’t make the same mistake again.”
Orion was feeling the presence of the group mind to which he was connected. They were closing the VPN loophole for him, and protecting themselves in the process. Wherever the rest of the convoy was headed, they would never reach their destination now. The lights they were homing in on had gone dark.
The group mind then set about helping him to upgrade his property with new surprises so Orion wouldn’t have to leave his beloved home and go into hiding. With their help he came up with ideas he would never have come up with on his own; he definitely had his own style, as it were, that he scarcely recognized until others chipped in their two cents. That meant whoever came up against him next would find it that much harder to profile him. They would in fact be profiling any number of creative artists’ handiworks, making it far more difficult to get a lock on his fighting style. Of course, the group mind could just help him with ideas and with self-evolving algorithms that could be transmitted wirelessly and introduced into the various new toys he was building for defenses. The rest was up to him and Proto.
***
Lazarus observed the fallout at Orion’s home on the smart-screen of his boat cruising the waters off Menorca, Spain, shaking his head, before cutting the image feed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with the world when a guy’s miniature golf course is ground zero for Armageddon. I really don’t.”
He steered the boat past the sailor of the handcrafted wooden Spirit Yacht with one sail waving at him from behind the wheel. His sail’s popping in the wind were the only nearby sounds not dampened by the wind. “This is the life, huh!” the guy shouted.
“You have no idea.”
“Hey, check out the water, huh? It’s so clear it’s like we’re flying on air. It’s like your own crystal ball out here.”
“It sure is.”
SIXTEEN
SOME WEEKS PRIOR
“When are we going to make time for the two of us?” Ethan held Monica’s gaze, his toes digging into his living room carpeting, as if there was no returning to the world of the living, no resurrection from Statue Man, until she answered him.
“I don’t know. I’m thinking the end of time sounds good.” Monica parted her hair out of her eyes as if she was confirming she could see to the end of time. As if she might actually be scratching it in on the calendar on her mindchip.
Ethan threw up his hands. The motion was so sudden and violent and unexpected he wasn’t sure he hadn’t pulled a muscle. It sure felt like he had. All so he could communicate, “That’s what’s wrong with the world! Everyone in a rush to get somewhere that’s not here!”
“If I race my mind at full tilt, I couldn’t match the idling speed of a CTW!” She had turned her back on him and now that she turned back to face him, she did so with such ferocity her hair whipped her in the face, temporarily blinding her, but also making her eyes tear up from the irritation of getting hair in her eye. The tears made her realize she needed an emotional outlet, not another puzzle for her mind, or at least it seemed to, since she softened. “I wish that weren’t the case, Ethan but it is,” she said a little more gently. “Tell me, with that in mind, how am I to justify taking downtime for the two of us?”
“All you self-important people with your sense of urgency that the world will not survive another minute without you! You’re the ones making it unsurvivable!” He was still gesturing, pacing, and carrying on, even if she seemed to be calming some.
“Is that why you’re so afraid to become transhuman? Is that how you see us? Unable to live in the here and now? Forever lost in the future, and in procuring the next big invention the world needs from us to keep from collapsing in on itself?”
“Well, you can’t deny it,” he said, sounding a little calmer, finally. “Didn’t I read somewhere that it’s actually a prime imperative? If the pace of innovation so much as slows, the Singularity collapses in on itself?” The Singularity was a term still en vogue with some folks to describe the intelligence explosion that the transhumanists were causing. “What’s that translate to, like some kind of massive dieback for all you chipheads? Isn’t that inevitable? Like bacteria exploding in population until they reach the limits of the petri dish? Or do you just plan to keep feverishly inventing away until you blast yourself out of space-time altogether? I imagine there’s unlimited amounts of room to grow in subspace or hyperspace or virtual reality or wherever you end up.”
She sighed and collapsed into the couch, folded her arms, crossed her legs and bobbed the top leg up and down. “I wish I could make you understand. It’s like a high, only better than anything you can get with heroine or any synthetic drug. The transhumanists feed off of one another’s creativity, find synergies that drive still more innovations. We need those innovations to spark one another, to feel more alive, to take in more life. It’s not so much an insatiable hunger as it is letting higher consciousness percolate through you with less and less resistance. We keep ourselves from sinking into negativity and any number of dark emotions like jealousy, fear, hate, anger, and lower energy states brought on by self-doubts because then our minds drop out of hyperspace. Without superb mental hygiene to help us stay positive, without that voice playing coach in our head saying, ‘You can do it. You need to do it,
for the greater good...’ Well, without that, the Singularity reaction would crash. It starts and ends with each of us. That’s our contribution to the greater good. That’s how we sustain Singularity, by staying positive. It’s like heaven is there and so is hell, all around us. All the time. Which one you’re in, which one of a thousand shades of gray between those extremes all comes down to how positive you can keep your thoughts.”
“Why is it you stay with me then? I’ve got nothing but doubts. I must do nothing but bring you down.” His tone communicated more emotions that he thought he had in him—all negative, all the kind she’d just finished warning him to avoid.
“You do bring me down.” She met his eyes furtively before breaking eye contact. “But I think in a good way. I think sometimes you have to go slow to go fast. Otherwise staying in hyperspace with your mind becomes more OCD than anything truly liberating. I know this intellectually, but…”
“You need me to help slow you down.”
The “Yes” was slow in coming, but it did finally come. Sounded more like a frog croaking.
“So, take me in your arms, then. What’s so hard about that?”
She wiped the tears from her eyes. “Because I’m addicted to the high.”
Convergence_ The Time Weavers Page 10
