“And look here?” Ethan pointed to the ghostly apparitions seated about the room. “Are these the same things that attacked you out on the lawn?”
Monica shook her head slowly as she thought it over. “No, this is something else entirely. Those are avatars. They’re part of the trance effect. Looks like the Pitman’s share a group mind with these people who couldn’t be present in body but could lend a fair amount of the computational powers of their minds to protecting the Pitmans.”
“I don’t suppose they’d pick avatars that look anything like them.”
“Probably not. But it doesn’t matter. If they can link up, they can be traced every time they do so.”
“You want to see what a group mind of this size can do against Verge?”
“I’m guessing the group mind is much larger than what we see here. If it wasn’t then, it is now, after the black hole stunt. They will have linked up if only to enhance their mind power.”
“So, if we,” he was pacing and taking hits off of an empty whiskey bottle without realizing it was empty, “working in cahoots with the group mind and against them—Techa this is so confusing—manage to survive Verge for round two… this game could go on a long time before we hit Verge’s limits or the limits of whoever’s hosting this little party.”
“I don’t think so. I think this next exchange is going to be pivotal. Our host is not going to sacrifice the group mind if its reached its maximum capacity and still can’t stand up to Verge. He or she’ll find a way to boost it. It’s that or risk running the whole experiment again, knowing it’ll be shut down this time before it gets off the ground. Can’t run the same gag on Verge twice and expect to get away with it.”
He tilted the whiskey bottle to vertical, gulped like a fish on air, then righted the bottle and gasped. “You’re thinking the instant the creator of the Liberator Gene initiates communication with the group mind to boost their abilities, he/she opens themselves up to be hacked.”
“We’ll have a lock on their location.”
“Then we close in and put an end to this.”
Monica sighed. “Or we switch sides. That’ll be the time to do it. We’ll know then who’s scarier, them or Verge. Our allegiance will buy the creator or creators of the Liberator Gene some time. Together we might be able to find a way to stop Verge in the end.”
He nodded. “We make a good team when we’re working together instead of cracking our heads against one another.” He took another deep draw from the empty whiskey bottle.
Monica snorted. “Don’t get used to it. Who knows if we’ll be on the same side come time to choose sides?”
Ethan averted his eyes. He didn’t like the sound of that. Looked to the empty bottle for salvation from the latest revelation. Finally saw it as it actually was, empty. “Thank God I order this stuff by the crate.”
TWENTY-THREE
Johnson entered the high-rise dragging Axelman, face down, by the foot. The scraping sounds he was making against the tiles were quite galling. The screeching a bit like a crow calling for help. The hotel concierge, a ME, short for Morality Engine, ran out from behind the counter holding his hands up placatingly. “Do we need to call the police?”
“We’re just having a little fun,” Johnson said. “It’s afterhours, our downtime.”
“Really, sir! Are you aware there’s a rear entrance for our S&M couples?”
“Is that a fact?” Johnson hadn’t slowed his marching gait the entire time the ME was trying to get a handle on the situation. “Why don’t you summon an elevator for us, Axelman?” Johnson said, swinging him like a bat and smashing him head first into the button to summon the elevator. The elevator light went on for “Up.”
“Have you considered couple’s therapy?” the ME said in a raised voice conveying a level of anxiety Johnson found entirely out of sorts with the situation.
“Never. Not once,” Johnson said.
As the elevator doors opened, Johnson threw Axelman in so hard the broke the mirror paneling on the back wall. “I could call a priest,” the ME said.
“Probably not a bad idea,” Johnson said, tapping the button for the fifty-sixth floor.
The ME ran off mumbling, “Now what was that church for chipheads again? Oh, that’s right, “The Church of Latter Day Artificials.” He ran to his computer and called up the number for the church. Speed-dialed on the phone with his synthetic reflexes to hasten the job. Waited patiently. “Hello? Is this the pastor?” He paused to let the other guy talk. “What do you mean why am I not calling you directly from my mindchip? I’m a concierge. It’s considered rude not to let our human customers eavesdrop.” There was in fact a man standing at the counter waiting to ask him something. The concierge let the guy on the phone talk. “Yes, I’m a ME. I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything.” Again he paused to let the man speak. “What do you mean if I couldn’t fix the situation, it can’t be fixed? We MEs do not advocate hopelessness. Hello? Hello?” He slammed the phone down on the receiver. “My Techa, humans are rude.”
The man at the counter gestured for help, but the ME couldn’t focus on him right now.
***
“Knock, knock,” Johnson said, slamming Axelman face-first into the door. “What do you know, nobody home.” Johnson parked Axelman’s head between his knees and squeezed. The crushing sound had Axelman screaming, despite his barely making a dent.
Johnson got the door open, walked through and attempted to close it with Axelman’s head in the doorjamb. “Is your head in the way? Oh, I’m sorry. Let me see what I can do to fix that?”
“If you could just tell me what I did?” Axelman pleaded.
Johnson threw him clear of the door, and locked it behind him. The door was indistinguishable from a bank safe door, from this side. No one was getting through to save poor Axelman. A Sherman Tank on the other side couldn’t save him. He dragged Axelman across his hardwood floor the same way he’d carried him inside the building. “I hope you’re not damaging my flooring,” Johnson said. “That would be very inconsiderate of you.” From the middle of the floor, he threw Axelman so hard he ended up embossed in the floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the city at night. Axelman didn’t appreciate his view of the city street below. Johnson couldn’t blame him; from this height, not even a humanik was going to fare terribly well if the safety glass gave.
“Is it coming to you yet?” Johnson said.
“No!” Axelman screamed. “Honestly, I’ve been the perfect little kiss-ass, sir.” He made faces at the traffic below that mostly involved squinting his eyes and tearing up to blur the view of the inevitable.
“You told a human CTW on the sixty-fifth floor of the Verge building that if he kept up the good work he could climb to the top some day! The nerve! Humans must never hold out hope that they can actually keep up with us. They must come to except the transhuman era is over and that the post-human era will be blazed by humaniks. They must realize we have no more use for them!”
“Don’t you think that’s…”
Johnson yanked him out of his glass prison and slammed him repeatedly, head-first into the floor, swinging him like a bat by his feet. “I just don’t think you’re getting it, Axelman. Why must you be such a slow learner? You see why I’m doing this? Why it’s for your own good. I can’t have you embarrassing yourself in public. I can’t have you carrying on like you have a second-rate mind compared to a transhuman.”
“Of course, you’re right sir. I’m very appreciative of all you’re doing for me, sir.”
Johnson stood him up so he could punch him to the torso repeatedly, rapid-fire. Then he threw Axelman over his shoulder. The action damaged Johnson’s range of motion. He could feel the tightening in his back, shoulders, and arms. “Now, look what you’ve made me do,” Johnson said, rotating this way and that to work out the kinks. But the sounds coming out of him suggested that there would be no working them out.
“Let me fix that for you, sir.” Axelman got up, giddily at fi
rst, then wobbled over to the kitchen where the repair tools were. They didn’t have much use for the kitchen besides self-repair, so they’d stocked it more like a garage.
Axelman brought the tools back out and proceeded to file away at Johnson’s vertebrae, shoulder blades and shoulder joints. A bit like a drunken sailor, considering he was in far worse shape. Johnson made wincing sounds. “Damn it! Can’t you do anything right?”
“Sorry sir. My incompetence embarrasses even me sometimes.” He did some more filing. “There, sir. Try it out now.”
Johnson grabbed Axelman by the neck and shook him, holding him about a foot off the ground. He released his neck hold, brought back his hands and smashed the sides of Axelman’s head together some more. Then he tried the very same over the shoulder move that had thrown out his back and shoulders earlier. “Perfect,” Johnson said.
At the sound of wind whistling through the window, Johnson looked up and reminded the smart-glass to mend itself. Which it did.
***
“Our neighbors have the best taste in music,” Johnson’s next door neighbor said, putting his ear up to the wall in an effort to melt into it.
The wife remarked from the bed, where she was filing her very long nails, “They’re smart walls, you moron. They absorb as much sound as they can and distort the rest to something we consider soothing ambiance. For all we know, they’re killing one another over there.”
***
Johnson was using Axelman like a trampoline now. Each time he came stomping down on him with both feet and rebounded, Axelman’s body flipped from the violence of the force. He groaned and squeaked and squealed like a car in a trash compactor, which Johnson figured, wasn’t too far from the truth.
Johnson paced around the body with his fists raised high in the air, taking a victory tour for his audience surrounding the imaginary ring, as if this were a WWF match.
He saw Axelman crawling away as best he could in his peripheral vision, making even more pathetic sounds as he did so. Let him gain a fake sense of surviving the night’s ordeal, before stepping in. “Where you going, Axelman? The fun’s just beginning. Have a wonderful ride I want to take you on.” He picked Axelman up by the feet and swung him in a circle about himself, round and round, knocking over vases with his head, lamps, kitchen counter appliances—actually metalworking tools. “How’s that sensitive mindchip in your skull doing? No flickering images yet? Well, not to worry.”
***
“No,” Johnson’s next door neighbor’s husband said, his ear still pressed against the wall they shared in common, “I can just barely hear them beyond the music. Sounds more amorous than that. I think they’re making love.”
The wife finally set down her nail file. Flared her tiger’s claws. “Why don’t you come over here and I’ll show you what love sounds like.”
He glanced back at her and purred. “Sure, kitten,” he said, crawling to her side of the bed. With his pot belly, big enough for twins, he didn’t get these kinds of offers too often anymore. So playing hard to get wasn’t going to fool anybody.
***
“Ah!”
Kapow!
“No!”
Smash.
“Please.”
Crunch.
“I’ll…”
Boom!
That foot to the face was particularly satisfying.
A short while later, Axelman was pummeled down to scrap on the floor. The crushing, pulverizing noises, to say nothing of the screams, kept from leaking out the apartment by the soundproofed walls and safety glass. Now came Johnson’s favorite part. “I love playing Jigsaw Puzzle with you,” Johnson said. Though Axelman was beyond appreciating his ad lib.
When Johnson had finally collected up all the pieces in a box, he started laying them out on the dining table, which was really more of an assembly table for nights like this. “Seems the only time I know any peace at all is when I’m putting you back together. It’s quite the meditation. Techa help you if I take up another hobby.”
It wasn’t too far into his meditation before Johnson had that mind-expanding moment he was hoping for. With any luck he’d just figured out how to oust that SME from the job Johnson and Axelman wanted for themselves. But he’d need Axelman to iron out the finer details. He picked up his pace with Axelman’s reassembly.
TWENTY-FOUR
Monica came in to Ethan’s apartment through a door that forever responded to her far better than it did to Ethan, with the bag of Chinese food, all in little boxes. “Thank Techa, some things never changed,” he thought. Bringing home Chinese was one of those classic dating things.
His on-again off-again girlfriend and partner in crime had justified making time for the two of them because the last time they did, it allowed her to get around whatever mental block was keeping her from progressing with their investigation. As was the case now; she had no idea how to coax the maker of the Liberator Gene to make the first move. She had no inkling where the group mind was located, so didn’t know how to stress it enough to get their benefactor to reach out and rescue them. That was his assumption as to her real motives for the sudden amorousness, at any rate. Otherwise, why get off the express train taking her into the future that was her life?
She unpacked the boxes, cracking them open and started digging in with the chopsticks before he could get to her from across the room to help out. She was evidently sweeping the room with rapid-fire exchanges with his house appliances because they were all hopping to. The vacuum droid was zipping about in stealth mode, sucking up detritus without making a sound so as not to disturb their date. Or at least making a very muffled sound. Robo-spiders were crawling up and down the walls, in and out of the cracks in the furniture, fixing the cracks in the walls, sucking up cobwebs, ferreting out stuff that had fallen between the seat cushions, making flash on-the-spot decisions for what they could incinerate in their stomachs.
He just shook his head in frustration.
“What?” she said.
“We humans are quite capable of taking care of ourselves, you know? We aren’t so primitive we don’t know how to bathe, and clean up after ourselves and cook our own food.”
“Seriously? Why didn’t you tell me? Like I don’t have enough on my plate already.”
He bit his lip and picked up one of the boxes of Chinese. But he was too slow on the draw. She reached into his box and fed him the ingredients with her chopsticks. Coordinating stuffing food in his mouth with stuffing food in hers. She missed the beat change where he just groaned in exasperation because she was too busy moaning in ecstasy before the Chinese food. “You really ought to try this with nanococktails to boost the tastes and smells and textures against the tongue and palate. Not to mention getting rid of all the noxious gas that comes in the aftermath. No offense.”
“None taken,” he said, perhaps too abruptly. He walked over to the remote to flick on the TV but she’d already beaten him to the punch, selecting a movie for the two of them. He threw down the remote with a sour expression that she also missed, her face buried in one of the other boxes of Chinese food, playing out her own Discovery channel special exploring the lands of different exotic substances in each box.
“Here, let me get you out of those street clothes, into something we can relax into in front of the TV better.” Just as his hands were going to her top button, the smart-clothes broke their own seams and dropped off her. The miniature droid quadcopters were already flying the spent clothes to the washing machine as the quadcopters from the bedroom bought her a fresh pair. She stuck her hands out and the droids dressed her by adjusting their hover and flight modes to her body language. All the choreography handled courtesy of her mindchip.
“Will you let me do for you for once!” he shouted, finally erupting like an active volcano stirred from dormancy against its will.
She looked at him as if she thought he might be seriously ill. She put her hand to his forehead. “Are you alright? Your blood pressure is up. Way up. It’s possibl
e you had a stroke and you don’t know what you’re saying.”
He gritted his teeth. “My mouth is working just fine. It’s your hearing that’s gone on the fritz.” He took the box of Chinese out of her hand and the chopsticks and took over feeding her. “Oh, I see. Why didn’t you just say so?”
“I’ve been saying so in so many words since you walked in the door. If you weren’t such a master of tuning me out…”
“Your prattle is very relaxing. I just have to set it to Canary mode where it sounds like chirping in the background. Sorry if I forget to switch back to actually paying attention to you from time to time.”
He teared up and his soundless laughs came out more like panting at the end of a long marathon. “Please tell me you’re joking.”
“Just a little bit.” She took back the box of Chinese.
“Oh, no you don’t. Why do you have such trouble with getting me to do for you? Some childhood trauma I should know about? Wait, I don’t have a chip, let me get a piece of paper so I can write it down. No way I can keep up with all the other childhood traumas otherwise.”
“Ha-ha.” She spread her lips at him a smile of resignation. “Fine. You’re right, of course.” She accepted the next mouthful awkwardly as if she was new to this whole being fed thing. As if she hadn’t mastered it as an infant. Talk about a sense of independence!
“You know, I bet if you can take these little lessons in healthy relating and apply them to your computer hacking and tracking down of the CTWs, you might just get somewhere. Or get there in half the time.” Ethan said it as if the idea had never occurred to her. He figured it couldn’t help to reinforce her own thinking on the matter before it waivered.
She sobered as if she heard him just fine and actually took in what he was saying. She snorted and nodded eventually. “Like tricking them into doing all the work for me instead of breaking down all their firewalls on my own.”
“Precisely.” He handed her the box of Chinese, pulled her feet up on his lap and started massaging them.
Convergence_ The Time Weavers Page 14
