“I believe we’re done talking,” Monica said.
“Yes, we are,” Orion conceded.
“Well, then. I’ll give you and your wife time to say your goodbyes to one another.” Monica got off the chair. Ethan followed limply.
***
Standing on the patio of Orion’s and Gilda’s home, Ethan said to Monica, “Probably for the best you give yourself a time-out as well. The last thing you need is to go all mission-ready when you haven’t considered all the angles.”
“I just needed time to get you out of harm’s way, Ethan. As to considering all the angles, that’s pretty much all I do, which is why I know they aren’t going to let us leave.” She pulled something off her leg that was strapped to her thigh. Attached it to Ethan, and pulled the ripcord. He was suddenly surrounded in a protective bubble. She kicked him like a giant soccer ball clear of the family’s property.
He hadn’t even landed before a fog covered the land. Blinding her. Monica hiked through the fog, away from the house. Ghostly apparitions materialized out of the mist. Relatives and loved ones dead and gone. It didn’t take her long to realize what was going on. She reached for the right tool for the right job, strapped to her upper left arm. One of Verge’s many toys she’d requisitioned the instant she hacked her way to some device that she figured might come in handy.
Her father reached out to her, imploring her to just let him touch her. She zapped him unceremoniously with the EMP gun. It was enough to short-circuit the nano hive mind procuring the visual illusion. It didn’t hurt that her hive mind had hacked it and discovered that on contact it would have eaten the flesh right off her body.
The apparitions continued to come at her like zombies too determined to feed their addiction to pay the gun much mind. The one of her mother kept saying, “It’s going to be all right, honey.” Her nano-neuro net told her this particular hive mind was coded to short-circuit her own mindnet, put her in a coma. She hit the momma cloud with the EMP burst. “Mother” dissipated back into the fog.
The ghosts were starting to move faster now, faster than even her transhuman reflexes could track. They had hit the kind of speeds you only see in vampire movies. The eerie sounds they made coming from all around her didn’t help with targeting them. She screwed on a “silencer” or what looked like one. And fired the EMP gun. The pulse this time took them all out, wherever they were, within range of the property and then some.
At the first burning sensation in her lungs, Monica donned her nose plugs, retrieved from a pocket in her shoulder pouch. The smart-filter didn’t need additional cuing. The instant it sensed the nature of the fog’s constituents, it sent out tendrils until it had her cocooned in a body suit impermeable to the mist. It even had the sense to grow in and around and under her weaponry so as not to get in the way. She should have been thankful for the Verge tech. All she could think of was that it was damned suspicious these people spent so much time figuring out how to put down every possible kind of rebellion. Was it the future they were trying to protect, or their own sense of control, as Orion had said? Damn him for putting the bug up her ass. The kind that wouldn’t respond to any of her tech interventions.
Monica noticed the fog was turning the grass beneath her feet to liquid. Even the rocks were dissolving like sand beneath the waves. Her own burning lungs long since restored to full functionality by the nano inside her still craved fresh air unfiltered by the nanotech. For it would hold chemical messengers that would offer additional cues that could help with her defense. Responding to her thoughts, the nano-suit adjusted its filtering so other odors, that wouldn’t cause her harm, but that would alert her of dangers, passed through.
Those smells alerted her to the ooze crawling up her nano-suit. It was waging some kind of war with the suit’s tech, trying to get through the impermeable barrier. To do what? The nano surface in contact with the green-brown ooze was too busy countering it to make much of its ultimate aim, other than it might well eat its way through her as well. Or maybe it would just expose her to the acid fog once again, Monica thought.
She ran toward the edge of the property. The acid-riddled mud was splashed all over her now. She hacked the robot fire hydrant at the edge of the property. It was supposed to morph into a robo-fireman, and direct its nozzles at her, washing away the caustic mud. It wouldn’t respond. Either the mud coating her was, among other things, a communications barrier, or the mist had evolved once again. This time the nano percolating through the air, throwing up a static field that shut down her ability to call in for reinforcements.
She reached for one of her weapons. It looked like a child’s water pistol. But it would come to the rescue of the nano in her suit. The smart-water reinforcing its ability to counter the caustic mud which was burning her now, reaching through the suit. The water pistol extruded its liquid, which did nothing to slow the mud’s progress past the “impermeable” membrane of her nanosuit.
Grabbing the nozzle for the flame thrower fed by the two canisters in the small of her back, so small they were hard to even notice owing to their ability to compress gas to such ridiculous extremes, she aimed the nozzle at herself and fired. It too had stopped working.
It finally dawned on her what had been going on when she was in the kitchen with the husband and wife. Doris wasn’t just eying her outfit wearily as she served her tea and crumpets, she was studying it for ways to neutralize her weapons. Monica thought she’d shut down in-house communications to keep them both off the net while they were talking with her. But whatever quantum-hacking technology Verge had at its disposal they must have used against this twosome before, which might explain why she was counter-hacked without even knowing it.
Out of moves, she gave her nano net some final instructions on how to coordinate with her mindchip to fulfill the last of her dictates as her biological brain and body started shutting down. One of those instructions involved finding a way to penetrate the communications barrier in order to send one final SOS to Verge.
As she felt herself losing consciousness, the last thing she saw was Ethan rolling towards her inside his protective bubble. “Damn it, Ethan! You have the survival sense of a lit candle in a tornado!”
***
Monica awoke to find herself inside the protective bubble with Ethan. “How are we still alive?” she said.
“Beats me.”
She tried to do a quick assessment of the situation. But her access to her nano-net was still down. Same with her access to her mindchip. That was one hell of a communications blackout. They were sitting in a depression in the lawn on the family’s property. Helpless. “As best as I can figure, this plastic cocoon is just too damn primitive for anyone to bother coming up with a countermeasure for it. No one would expect it to be used in this day and age.”
“That’s me. Such a throwback I’m actually a leap forward.”
She ignored him. “Come on. We have to roll to the edge of the property. Hope their defenses don’t extend any further.”
“For someone just recently back from the dead, you have no sense of how to stop and smell the roses. Everyone else I ever read about recovering from a near-death experience says if it’s one thing they learned…”
She ignored him and, with a roar, spun them in the direction she wanted to go. Her nano infused muscles were still strong enough to cover Ethan’s end of things. Once at the property line and onto the road, she took full advantage of the downward slope to pick up momentum.
“In case you haven’t noticed, no one’s shooting at us anymore,” Ethan said, “I think we can relax.”
“Not on your life. I left instructions with my mindchip as to what to do the second it had communications back up again. It will be acting on those instructions even if it is still cut off from my mind and my neural net.”
“And what instructions are those?”
“To wipe Clark County off the map.”
“Here, let me help you with that forward roll.”
TWENTY-ONE
<
br /> “There’s all sorts of ways to wipe Clark County off the map that wouldn’t be entirely final, right?” Ethan’s voice sounded like a hamster’s, but it was Monica’s guess it was no longer entirely under his control. “Not to chipheads and nano-net people. Some part of them would live on, even if they were carrying around irradiated meat suits that were rotting off of them, like some Walking Dead episode. Eventually the biological components would grow back with the help of the mindchips and the neural nets.”
“You’re exactly right,” Monica said. “That’s why, whatever Verge hits us with, they’ll be sure to factor that into the equation.”
Ethan went silent, evidently out of jokes and out of parting wisdom.
Their downhill trajectory had finally led them some place useful. A deserted Lamborghini at the side of the road. Maybe it had belonged to one of the Convergence Technology Wizards that had to flee for their lives and couldn’t afford to take anything that they could be tracked in.
Monica and Ethan crawled out of the protective bubble, with her doing most of the tearing and ripping, jumped into the Lamborghini. Ethan noticed it was another Uber rental and frowned. Monica put the car in gear and sped off.
“For once I wouldn’t mind having a 4x4 all-terrain vehicle,” Ethan mumbled. “Not sure this sports car is going to be of much use where we’re going.”
“It’s an all-terrain Lamborghini roadster.” She said it like something a five-year-old child would know.
“You can’t get a sports car this low to the ground to act like a 4x4!”
The car didn’t waste any time proving him wrong even as she continued to accelerate. “Oh. It’s one of those ten cars-in-one deal. I suppose someone had to design something for those of us who can’t seem to make up their minds on anything.”
In all fairness, she thought, there was only one thing he could never make up his mind about, whether to become transhuman or not. You’d think a day like today would settle that argument once and for all!
He checked the side view mirror on his side. “Oh, Jesus!” Ethan’s Adam’s apple bobbed violently. “What the hell is that?”
Monica checked her rearview mirror as the car got pulled back and lifted off the ground in the direction of the growing sphere of darkness behind them. “It’s a miniature black hole,” she said. “Any luck, it’ll stop swallowing up space-time before it gobbles us up.”
“So much for my zombie apocalypse. The whole black hole thing will be damn anticlimactic if we actually survive. I mean what’s scarier, an empty crater, or people walking around looking more dead than alive?”
The car fell to the ground as the black hole sealed itself back up.
She put the car in gear and headed them back in the direction they were going before they were so rudely interrupted.
“Tell you one thing,” Ethan said. “I’m still not sure I’m doing the right thing or working for the right people. But if Verge can open up a black hole on command, I say we continue to side with them until we have something more than moral ambiguousness to offer in our defense.”
Monica checked out the crater in the rearview mirror. “For once we agree on something.”
TWENTY-TWO
Ethan had a holo simulation up in his living room, a reenactment of the black hole explosion he’d witnessed. Every time the black hole reaction initiated he made a “Poosh!” sound with his lips, mimicking the sound of the explosion. “Just how many fields of study you think a Convergence Tech Wizard has to stitch together to procure one of these babies, you think?”
Monica, fetching one of Ethan’s whiskey bottles for herself in the kitchen—forget that it was nine o’clock in the morning—looked up at the holo. “More than my upgraded brain can count.”
“What if Verge put all of their best guys on this? How doable would it be then? Maybe that’s what the upper floors in the building are for? Group minds interconnecting the best of the best of the planet’s CTWs.”
Monica thought about it as she sipped her drink. The nano would be pissed off at her, as the liquor would interfere with its self-evolving algorithms. Her body was already tingling as if she had a Charlie-horse all over. She didn’t care. It made her feel alive. A novel feeling after a run in with a black hole. “Maybe. But if that’s the case, then they’re in violation of their own prime directive, which is to do everything possible to avoid spawning these runaway effects.”
“Yeah, well, was it just me or did that SME give you the creeps too? Morally and ethically superior to the rest of us, my ass. More like he can bamboozle the rest of us into thinking he’s morally and ethically superior with his hopped up brain. That’s not the same as being right.”
Monica felt strangely more willing to entertain evidence to the contrary of her opinions about their mission. Making no effort to shut Ethan down. Once again, surviving a black hole tended to do that to a person. She was ready to admit she wasn’t so sure of anything anymore. Such tech as a controlled black hole reaction shouldn’t exist for another hundred years at least. Even allowing for Ray Kurzweil’s analogy of the effects of transhumanism on evolution. He was famous for saying, “Take a penny and double it each day. How rich do you think you would be at the end of a month?” Most people guessed some figure in the hundreds to the tens of thousands. The actual answer was in the millions. Geometric rates of growth were inclined to be that way. They snuck up on you in the early days and then they doubled so fast it was beyond even transhuman comprehension. So the future was never as far off as you thought it was. The far future could be sucked into present with that kind of pull on it. Now these Convergence Tech Wizards were starting to make it look like Kurzweil needed another analogy. The penny one was understating the truth.
“I suppose we’re dead in the water,” Ethan said. “Ironic, considering we just survived a black hole.”
“What do you mean?”
“Can’t imagine any evidence survived that could lead us to other CTWs, the ones generating runaway effects. What should we call them? CTWRs?”
“I have complete 3D rendering of our trip to the Pitmans on my mindchip if you want to load it on your holo monitor to play with. I’m sure you can dig up something.”
“Why don’t you sound all that interested?”
“I’m not sure it’s the best path forward.”
He hit her with the grimace of death and hands spread wide. “Compared to what?”
“Someone salted that community with a mind-boosting cocktail. I want to know who that person is. You want to cure an ailment you don’t chase after the symptoms. You get to the underlying cause.” She hammered the whiskey bottle down on the counter.
“Makes sense. But why do you think they ran that experiment? I mean whoever did it could just as easily have unleashed their Liberator Gene—let’s call it—on all of mankind. Free them once and for all from the tyranny of companies like Verge.”
Monica took a deep breath. It was a damn good question.
Ethan was playing with the holo files of their visit to the Pitman’s, looking for clues, even if Monica was busy disparaging his efforts.
“Maybe they didn’t want to show their hand,” she suggested. “However powerful they are, they’ve got limits like the rest of us. And there’s the matter of Verge to consider. Who knows what they have to throw at a person?”
“So rather than fix the world all at once, only to find out someone can undo your good work, and now you have nothing to counter with, you play strategy games against a superior opponent.” He ran his fingernails back and forth along one of the crinkles in his forehead. “Get him to show his hand so you know when and how to uplift consciousness en masse. Smart. Wish I’d thought of it.”
“You did think of it. Only you weren’t the first one.”
“So what’s our move then?”
She took another swig of liquor from the bottle. Belched. “We’re going to try it your way.”
“Oh, yeah. Why?”
“Because I want to know just
what Verge can and can’t do myself. Let’s play the game using our opponent’s strategy.”
“So we’re defecting to their side?” Ethan said with upwards inflection as the words spilled out.
“Not exactly. That would just get us killed. You can bet Verge is keeping tabs on us. More like double agents. We play both sides from the middle until we decide which side we want to come down on.”
He grabbed the whiskey bottle off the kitchen counter before she could finish it and took a swig. “Don’t look now, but you’re sounding more like me. More given over to your own ambivalence.”
“The truth I suspect lies between our two extremes. Let’s just say by meeting in the middle, we’re both becoming a lot more strategic about how best to navigate towards our end goal, even when we don’t know what that end goal is exactly.”
Monica was expecting a “Got ya,” or “Makes sense.” Something. But Ethan missed the beat entirely. And the next few after that. He was back to toying with his hologram. The swig of whiskey must have shaken loose an idea. “What is it?” she said.
“I think I found the smoking gun.”
She came out from behind the kitchen counter to examine what he was studying on the holo monitor before him. It was the coverage of the Pitman’s kitchen shortly after they’d left. Before Monica had lost the connection she was hacking. Her biological brain was too busy at the time to process the information. But her mindchip had dutifully backed it up for when she’d have a chance to revisit the scene.
“Do you see that?” Ethan said.
“Yeah, it’s like he and the wife are in some kind of trance.”
Convergence_ The Time Weavers Page 13
