Convergence_ The Time Weavers

by Dean C. Moore

  “You don’t have to let go of the high. You just need to change the frequency you experience it on, like changing the channel on the radio in your head.” He came over to her, sat beside her on the couch and ran his hand lightly over her leg. The soft, slippery sensation seemed to coax her the rest of the way into her body. He continued gliding his fingers over her, and eventually added kisses to her skin, with a taste like no other, to the repertoire of titillation until her parasympathetic nervous system kicked in, overriding the sympathetic nervous system which fed off of adrenaline, speed, and her customary go-go state.

  He heard her breathing change rhythm and felt it against his neck. A kind of pulsing and throbbing all its own. He wondered if he ever did upgrade if he could ever pull her back into her body again. Or would they both find it impossible to unplug, to relax? She was right; they were the perfect counterbalance to one another as they were.

  She kissed him, releasing self-dissolving nano into him, which in turn caused him to relax further. It was one of the few violations he permitted because it enhanced their lovemaking. The more relaxed he felt in his body, the more natural in his movements, the more she relaxed in turn. Their writhing over one another changed in character imperceptibly from rubbing up against one another’s shins and bony parts like awkward teenagers, to something more snakelike, the slithering happening without causing discomfort, until finally, they had melted into one another and were no longer entirely clear who was in who’s body exactly.

  Their lovemaking took on a beautiful choreography to it, as if their higher selves were taking over, or as if their bodies knew better than their minds what they needed from each other to continue to release the genies from the bottles of their bodies. It was not uncommon for both of them to find themselves up near the ceiling, drifting out of their bodies somewhere in the aftermath, waiting for their bodies to tense up enough again so it could actually hold them, without the genies escaping through all the porous holes in the bottles.

  ***

  PRESENT DAY

  Ethan wondered what had made his life flash before his eyes, most noticeably such a choice memory of him and Monica making love. They had left the countryside cum battle zone behind them as the Maserati took the off-ramp into the city.

  It was the blast of a car horn that caused him to get his bearings again.

  He remembered now where he was and why he’d drifted off.

  He was shell-shocked.

  The urban jungle was proving to be the least of their problems as they entered the city.

  It was the urban warfare coming straight at them that was the more pressing concern.

  SEVENTEEN

  Monica had steered them into downtown Chicago in the Maserati they were driving on Ethan’s suggestion. At the time he’d had enough of rural warfare. He thought that urban warfare would at least be a break from the kind of arsenal the military didn’t mind employing against them in wide open spaces. Inside a crowded city, surely they would have to tone things down a bit just to keep from harming innocent civilians.

  It didn’t take long to expose the shortcomings in his logic. “Can you tell we’re being herded?” Monica said, noticing the suspicious changing of traffic lights every time she came up to one.

  “I can’t imagine that anywhere in this urban jungle is any better or any worse than any other to come at us. You’re just imagining things.” By the hairs standing up on back of his neck he knew it was himself he was trying to convince, not her.

  “Is that so?” she said taking a turn onto the latest street and finding her car sandwiched by a long line behind and in front of her, traffic at a dead standstill. She pointed at one of the skyscrapers on the street just ahead of them.

  The building did have one thing to set it apart from all the others, he noted. It was a LEGO-like assembly of robot soldiers, all invisible until they started peeling themselves off the building. The “sand castle” in the sky dissolved into so many grains of sand at the first wave to hit them; only the “grains of sand” were urban fighter droids. They didn’t come with weapons. They didn’t need them. They scrounged what they needed as they made their way towards Monica and Ethan. They peeled the tops off of cars and fashioned the smart metal on the fly—meant to self-heal in the event of an accident—into weapons of greater use to them.

  The robots’ hands were 3D printers that used the base stock they were being fed to carve knives, swords, projectile weapons like hand guns and automatic rifles, laser blasters, rocket propelled grenade launchers. One of the bots kept grabbing up cars and smashing them into himself. His entire body a composite of any number of 3D printers, the cars quickly got reassembled around him, making him bigger and bigger. The people trapped inside the cars were now trapped inside him. They didn’t look like they were particularly enjoying the new ride they were on.

  “Time to make ourselves scarce,” Monica said, punching a hole in the bottom of the car.

  “It’s a Maserati!”

  “It’s a rental.”

  “I can’t believe you can split hairs like that!”

  “Try and prioritize your personal crises a little better, Ethan.”

  Ethan looked up to see people jumping out of their cars, pressing the key remotes in their hands. The remotes caused the robots to release their grips on the weapons they were wielding. The humans then picked up the weapons and used them against the robots. “Nice mind-hacking job,” Ethan said, recognizing Monica’s handiwork, infiltrating the minds of the robots and the chipped-humans both. “Can you turn me into Ninja-fighting, dude? I could use the exercise.”

  “That’ll teach you to be a worthless meat sack that no one can hack,” she said absently, making a bigger hole in the floor and shoving the waste matter out the bottom of the car. “Should be big enough for you to fit through now. Find yourself a manhole cover, get down into the sewers. I’ll meet up with you there.” She handed him a sliver of car she’d fashioned into a manhole cover opener for him.

  “You want me to swim up a river of shit not of my own making? I appreciate the surprise plot twist, but…”

  She grabbed his face, kissed him on the lips. “I know you crack wise when you’re under stress. But I kill people when I’m under stress.”

  “I’m leaving.” He dove through the hole and crawled under the car. Thank Techa for the smart-Maserati that adjusted its height off the ground for him. Poor thing probably thought he was trying to change its oil. The other cars all provided him the same self-jacking service until he could find a manhole one of the vehicles was parked over. If anyone was trying to track his movements, Techa help them, because all of the cars were trying whatever reflexive moves they could manage in the middle of a war zone.

  ***

  Monica climbed out of the Maserati onto its hood and from there jumped the car rooftops until she found the vehicle she wanted. The droid soldiers chasing her were dismantling the rooftops they were running on, turning the scrap parts into knife-edged boomerangs to lob at her, catch and send again. The laser guns and pistols, which the 3D printers in the soldiers’ arms and legs fashioned every bit as quickly as the boomerangs, wasted no time gunning her down. By then she’d hacked some of the robot shooters well enough so the only things they hit were the soldiers coming at her from the opposite direction.

  She ordered the sunroof at her feet to part for her with a signal from her mindnet and jumped into the driver’s seat. She noted the freaked out husband and wife in the backseat hoping only to catch some nookie while their driverless car dealt with the stress of traffic in its own way. Monica took the car into the air and immediately engaged evasive maneuvers against the goliath robot, comprised of so many smaller ones, taking swings at her. The late-model BMW she hijacked came with its own onboard 3D printers for self-mending following an accident. The BMW’s 3D printing system, granted, worked a little differently than the ones the robots chasing after her were using. The building that had spawned the robots must have been built earlier. The BMW’s
healing abilities were secondary to intricately woven nano-vascular and nervous systems which had access to synthetic stem-cells. These stem cells grew the new auto body parts as needed, more along the lines of how salamanders grew new limbs. They didn’t seem any slower when it came to handling the morphing than the other approach the robots were using.

  Monica, having hacked the BMW’s brain-web, put the car’s headlights to firing lasers. The 3D printers managed the morphing quickly enough. She thereby chopped the goliath trying to swat her out of the sky into chunk meat.

  But in so doing, she’d only multiplied the number of her attackers. And now they were even more nimble than before, able to vault off almost any perch, whether holding on to the side of a building or the top of a car, in her direction. Their fists even more adept at pounding through her windshield. She took a deep calming breath as her world was about to cave in, literally. The spider cracks multiplying across the metal-glass dome of the vehicle. She heard Ethan’s voice in her head, “Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast, Monica. Go slow to go fast.” She closed her eyes and forced herself to relax further into a trance. Forced herself to remember what it felt to be in Ethan’s arms not too long ago.

  Her eyes flicked open as if coaxed by electroshock. “That’s it!”

  Taking the car lower, she lasered through Goliath-Junior’s body—the one that kept making himself bigger by sticking cars to himself. She hurled the broken pieces at the smaller robots with the aid of a pulsing magnetic field which she procured by sending EMP-like bursts through the car’s nervous system. Until it dawned on her. “Duh. Stop trying to fabricate magnetic fields and use the EMP rifles the way they were meant to be used! Direct the EMP bursts at the droids!”

  She was taking them down in large swatches now. But it was a numbers game she couldn’t win.

  A few near scrapes against the sides of buildings and trucks stuck in traffic to peel off the droid soldiers glommed on to her and it was definitely time for another strategy.

  “When the dealer said it’d be the ride of our lives, he wasn’t kidding,” the wife said to the husband in the backseat. Until then, Monica had forgotten all about them. She navigated down to street level again, flipped the car over and pulsed the magnetic field to bounce the manhole cover out of the way. With the car in hover mode, she dropped out the skylight down into the sewer below. She signaled the car to take the passengers wherever they were headed. Having not broken the link yet, she heard the husband say, “Did you know this car could fly?”

  “Why would I?” the wife said. “We ordered the basic model.”

  The husband sighed. “I may not be a fan of progress, but I do love what it does to that word, ‘basic’.”

  Monica severed her mindnet connection to the aircar with the two elderly backseat drivers.

  A quick hack of the sewer system’s security systems—it had several—showed her where Ethan was.

  The problem was, he wasn’t alone.

  ***

  Ethan looked up at two very large and imposing robots of the only-vaguely-humanoid-in-outline variety. One had a human skin patch across his upper chest and covering one arm. The other one had a skin patch covering half of his face. They wore them kind of like tattoos. “Um, you’re not going to believe this,” Ethan said, “but I come down here for long walks to clear my mind. It’s so stressful this time of day above ground.”

  “Ethan Redman, if you’ll please come with us,” the one with the skin glove stretched over his left arm said.

  “Sure.” Ethan gulped. “You want to set the pace for our new walking club, go right ahead. I’m the accommodating sort.”

  “Stop right there,” Monica said. The two robots turned their heads, then their entire bodies towards her. The sounds they made simply rotating their body parts was enough for Ethan to actually be glad the sewers smelled like shit, just in case he’d lost control of his bowels. When they took a step towards her, it was the creaking in their joints that really put the finishing touches on the whole menace thing just perfectly.

  “I’m afraid you won’t find it so easy to hack us, Monica Chapman. If you don’t stop trying I’ll be forced to do something I’m sure we’ll both regret later.” That was the one with the skin patch across his face talking.

  The other one was immediately far more conciliatory. “This isn’t what you think,” Skin Glove said. “We won’t harm you unless you give us no other choice.”

  “Monica, dear,” Ethan cut in, “I say if they have a way out from under an army of robots, we take it, and ponder their deeper darker motivations later.”

  Monica snorted, “Fine,” falling into step behind their new bodyguards.

  EIGHTEEN

  The elevator was ascending. Ethan found the two robots that had escorted Monica and him this far to be all the more imposing in close quarters. “So, isn’t like Verge what Google was, once upon a time, the largest, most powerful corporation in the world?” he said.

  “Yes. I’m Axelman, by the way,” Skin Glove said, extending his arm for Ethan to shake. Ethan eyed the exposed “musculature” that could crush his hand better than a trash compactor, painted a fake smile on his face and accepted Axelman’s hand in a friendly gesture. “And my gruff friend here is known as Johnson. Humans aren’t exactly his thing, even the upgraded kind.”

  “Ah, a fellow snob. Glad to see we have something in common.” Johnson showed no sign of responding to Ethan’s glib sensibility. Other than to tighten up. His “muscles” just grew more rigid. Exposed metal pieces slid over one another and looked thicker, more powerful.

  “Where are we headed?” Monica asked.

  “To meet with the COO,” Axelman replied. “He runs the company now in the CEO’s absence.”

  “What’s he like?” Ethan asked.

  “Don’t know. We’ve never met him before. Not sure he wants to meet us now. But he definitely wants to meet you.”

  The elevator doors dinged and the entourage proceeded into the penthouse suite.

  ***

  There was a collective gasp as they all exited the elevator. Monica couldn’t speak for Axelman and Johnson, but she was surprised to find a robot seated behind the COO’s desk. He rose and came around to shake their hands. Perhaps Axelman and Johnson were surprised because this robot looked a lot less intimidating than them, both in frame and bearing, and he had a smaller head. Ergo, how could he fit more brain matter inside it?

  “Sorry for the cloak and dagger,” the COO said. “I’m Locus, and by now you’ve met Axelman and Johnson. My top people. They’ve risen, along with everyone else in the company, entirely on merit.”

  Monica could feel Axelman and Johnson stand up straighter at the complement, even if she didn’t have a full picture of them out of the corners of her eyes.

  “Please, have a seat,” Locus said, gesturing to the chairs. Monica and Ethan followed him up on his offer. The chairs were too small for Axelman and Johnson, who remained standing where they were.

  “What if I said I could take care of your military problem in exchange for a small favor?” Locus said.

  The stealth-like manner in which Locus slipped into his seat, the fact that he moved without making any sound at all, somehow resonated with Ethan as even creepier than the very scary sounds Axelman and Johnson couldn’t help making every time they so much as twitched a finger.

  Monica and Ethan exchanged glances. “We’re listening,” Ethan said.

  Locus slid his finger across the smart desk and threw up a holo between him and Monica and Ethan. “These are some highlights from a scene that happened earlier today. The husband and wife team featured here are known as Orion and Doris Pitman. Up until quite recently they’ve both been a pair of remarkably normal, if somewhat upscale suburbanites. The husband has always been a prolific inventor, but using one or another field of technology. He was not a Convergence Tech Wizard. At least not before today. And neither was the wife.”

  “And yet they’re pulling off stuff your Co
nvergence Tech Wizards can’t do,” Monica said, filling in the blanks for him.

  Locus looked up, his eyes widening. “That’s precisely right.”

  “I wouldn’t say that, sir,” Johnson said, stepping in.

  “That’s okay, Johnson. It’s best to keep things honest between friends, especially if you want to keep them as friends,” Locus said. Johnson seemed to catch his innuendo just fine and stepped back, albeit begrudgingly, going by the sounds he was making.

  “Johnson and Axelman have analyzed the situation in Clark County,” Locus said, “and it appears some, I’m sure, well-meaning person released a genetic cocktail that turns everyone into Convergence Tech Wizards. We believe the source to be the food supply. All locally grown.”

  “You want us to recruit the born-again CTWs? Get them to work for you?”

  “No, Ethan,” Locus said, “we want you to find them and kill them.”

  Ethan squirmed in his chair. “We’re not assassins, sir.”

  “We’ll do it,” Monica said.

  “No, we won’t!” Ethan glared at Monica hoping to win the argument with a stare down alone.

  “Think about it, Ethan. The reason Verge exists, the reason even Anonymous, People-Are-Us, and Sousveillance, allows it to exist as a private enterprise is to throttle down the amount of world-changing technologies to something we can all absorb. Not just the most tech-loving, upgraded transhumans in the mix.”

  “I’m afraid Monica is right, Ethan,” Locus said. “As it is, we exist largely as a meeting place for the best Convergence Tech Wizards on the planet. We bring them together so they can inspire one another. We give them free reign, whatever budget they need to follow their dreams. And as to which of their inventions make it to market, well, ultimately, we do police that, but with outside counsel weighing in. You mentioned three of them, Anonymous, Sousveillance, and People-Are-Us. If all these humanitarian agencies agree that it’s too much for people to absorb, we hold off, maybe years, maybe indefinitely. Even if just one of the groups has concerns, we hold off. We consider it part of being responsible corporate citizens.”