Convergence_ The Time Weavers

by Dean C. Moore

  If someone did get a lock on him, he could burrow underground faster than a sand snake, ostensibly to get out of the heat. Live and move about below the surface indefinitely. It would be enough to eat sand to regenerate himself, courtesy of his modified gut bacteria. But he could sense the finest vibrations in the earth to hunt and track prey if he was of a mind to.

  His genetic modifications for surviving this no man’s land had reached overkill he didn’t know how many tweaks back. But there was no such thing as being too-off-grid when it came to the people chasing him. Verge wasn’t the kind of company to give up. And his convergence tech wizardry wasn’t the kind of thing they took lightly. He had command of numerous biological sciences, not to mention numerous fields of engineering, physics, and electronics that went into designing his skull cap. Add in specialties in medicine, space medicine, undersea medicine… there was truthfully no place on earth he couldn’t hide out. Even hiding in plain sight in a crowded city wouldn’t present much of a challenge to him. As he was rather adept with communications technologies and computer hacking as well.

  Whoever had upgraded him had done a number on him and then some. He had a computer chip in his brain and a nano net running not just through his mind but connecting up his entire body. Of course, he had those things before she had hacked her way into him. It was her upgrades that had done the trick. He was the next generation human, well ahead of time, even in a transhumanist age, which didn’t have much respect for time, and was forever compressing the time line, dragging more of the future into the here and now faster and faster. Who could say how long he’d be truly remarkable? However long, it was too long for the likes of Verge.

  Even as the word “Verge” lingered on the tip of his tongue, the desert opened up, a crack running right down the middle. The ground literally tore apart under his legs.

  In rushed the ocean.

  So, the bastards had found him after all, after every precaution. And they were turning the Sahara into an inland sea just to get rid of him. No, strike that, they were sinking the entire continent of Africa! Planning on turning it into the largest underwater fun-park in the world, attracting scuba divers from all over, rife with underwater restaurants, hotels. They would even reconstitute the African habitats, every last one, only, under glass domes over which swam fish. There was something quite lovely in the mad plans. As to the billions of Africans that would be killed, apparently bringing them back from the dead would be part of the underwater schools’ curriculum for the kids, as part of teaching them civic responsibility. The monsters behind this, Johnson and Axelman, had actually turned the entire project into an exercise in civic responsibility!

  For once, Ferro wished he was less of a hacker, that he’d been less successful at worming his way into Johnson’s and Axelman’s minds. The idea was to keep an eye on Verge by keeping an eye on their top management, the ones who oversaw all the Convergence Tech Projects. How better to anticipate what was coming for him? But now that he saw, he decided it would have been better not to know. Better to pretend that it was Mother Earth exacting her justice rather than two far-too-empowered humaniks. The human-hating Johnson had held himself in check for too long. Even his merciless beat downs of his partner in crime, Axelman, didn’t vent his rage so much as feed it.

  So, why hadn’t Ferro seen this coming? He continued to contemplate the matter even as his CRISPR-head plate continued his genetic modifications on the fly to accommodate his new home under the ocean. That’s why! The bastards had initiated these actions without the approval of the COO. Who would have thought they’d risk such career-ending maneuvers? At the end of the day, they were enterprising, ambitious, but not that terribly creative. They were skin suits, for Techa’s sake, not the actual Convergence Tech Wizards who they oversaw.

  Ferro upgraded his hacking of Verge, drilling further into their doings. It was no longer enough just to see into their minds. So that’s where the problem started! Hidden in the topmost stories of the Verge skyscraper were their best Convergence Tech Wizards. It was the ones on the ninety-ninth floor, with an eye to the COO’s office themselves that had empowered Johnson and Axelman with the creative mind-power to pull off this stunt. And the one in Greenland! Damn, this was not the first, but the second continent-sized land mass they’d wiped off the map. All in a land grab for the COO’s office. The Convergence Tech Wizards who had masterminded the first two strikes against the group mind Ferro was a part of did so on the understanding that they would be promoted to CTOs, Chief Technology Officers, the instant Johnson and Axelman had the SME’s job. Basically, they would become what Johnson and Axelman had been prior to vacating their posts. Their incentive had been provided by Axelman; it was his bright idea to promote them to CTOs for helping him and Johnson.

  Screw this. These bastards would wipe out half the planet and make it look like they were doing Techa’s work just to shut down Ferro and his people. It meant going against protocol, but it was time to fire up the group mind. They were under express instructions not to risk the others to save themselves. But to save an entire continent? Well, too late for that, but there was the next mad genocidal scheme Johnson and Axelman would be moving on to to consider.

  He pulsed the signal to bring everyone up to speed rather than maintain a constant link that could be all the more easily tracked. And he waited.

  He had time get used to breathing through his new gills before a transmission came through. His CRISPR unit had kept him alive up until then by adapting the cells in his lungs to move more oxygen into his lungs than was in the sea water, by essentially splitting the H20 molecules, and venting the hydrogen. His body maintained the backup system for extra energy when needed, like swimming around a killer whale. The one headed for him now.

  The group mind was ready to make its move. Ferro was curious as to what it would be.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Interesting. The group mind had decided to fight back. Not just to defend themselves. They were going to war against Verge. Despite Ferro’s objections. They decided it was the best way to expose Verge for what it was, a glorified war machine under the guise of being a corporation solely concerned for perpetuating peace and profits.

  The mind link was up now and sustained. No longer pulsing. They could have continued to deliberate and take actions both with a pulsed signal. But they flew in the face of Ferro’s suggestion yet again, choosing to sustain the signal. The fools wanted to be caught. They knew they were going to lose the war. They wanted to lose. They would not become monsters themselves, willing to destroy much of the planet just to protect themselves. They only wanted to drag Verge’s true evil nature out of the darkness and into the light. And they figured they didn’t have to last all that long to do that.

  The first strike came at the group mind’s hands. They took down the sky-net—the entire satellite ecosystem in orbit around the earth. Every last bit of broadcasting equipment zooming around the earth in excess of 80,000 miles an hour.

  The second strike also came at the group mind’s hands. Before Verge even had a chance to retaliate. EMP pulses were fired over every continent on earth, essentially wiping out the last bit of electronic communications anywhere, effectively bombing mankind back into the Stone Age. For an essentially peaceable lot of folks with a pacifist, non-interventionst policy, the Synthia-initiated group mind had some strange ideas about fighting minimalist wars. The coordinated attacks of EMP pulses were pulled off by hacking supposed nuclear silos that had long been retrofitted as EMPs large enough to bomb an opponent into the Stone Age by igniting high in the atmosphere over a given country. That way the victors could enjoy the spoils without having to wait hundreds of thousands of years to invade the conquered lands.

  Ferro was beginning to wonder if Verge could mount a counterattack. Then again, this was Verge he was talking about, so he wasn’t holding his breath either way.

  ***

  “We have a lock on them?” Johnson asked.

  Axelman nodded.


  “Good call taking us off world.”

  “I figured sinking two continents would generate an extreme response of some kind. Didn’t know what it would be, but figured being off world was our safest bet.”

  “For once your cowardice proves to be our best strategic asset.” Johnson fingered the controls on the spaceship, taking it out of its hover dock on the dark side of the moon. Well out of scanner range of Earth. But the sensors they had on the moon’s other side alerted them to the new technological dark ages subsuming Earth in a black primeval cloud all the same.

  It wouldn’t last long. Soon every electronic device would pulse back on. They had all been EMP-hardened by Verge against just such an attack strategy. Verge could have ensured that just their branded products came back on line, but that would have meant curtailing spying on the ninety-nine percent. Techa forbid. In the end, the resistance wouldn’t even have succeeded in putting an electric toothbrush out of commission for long.

  “You’re going to open a wormhole to get us in orbit around earth?!” Axelman said, the frog in his throat clear to anyone within earshot. “Not worth the risk!”

  “I’ll be damned if I give the resistance time to crawl under some new rock.”

  “The 99th floor Convergence Tech Wizards are not gods, not even demi-gods, even after climbing that far from ground level. They warned us it wasn’t clear if enough strands had come together yet to make this technology viable. The synthesis may not hold.”

  “It doesn’t have to. It just has to get us to Earth in time. A relative hop and a jump.”

  “You would risk everything we’ve achieved?!”

  “Time to show you what a no-guts-no-glory approach to war can do for us. Time for the coin to flip over, Axelman. You had your day.” Johnson engaged the drive.

  Took a deep breath. In reality, a slipping of his hydraulics in lieu of his own nervousness had made the “breath” sound for a humanik with no lungs.

  And closed his eyes.

  When he opened them again, he was in orbit around Earth. “I told you. The bold shall inherit the Earth, Axelman.”

  Johnson flipped another switch.

  ***

  Ferro felt himself being yanked out of the ocean and up into the atmosphere. That was one hell of a tractor beam! Not even he could have procured one of those. He wondered if the Synthia-initiated group mind could. More to the point, if they could neutralize it in time. As he conferred with the group mind on the problem, he set to work neutralizing the effects being dragged into the high atmosphere and eventually out of the earth’s protective biosphere would have on him. He wasn’t sure the others in the group mind had the expertise to do this, and even if they did, they had enough other problems to contend with right now. The nano in his body would have to contend with most of the heavy lifting, as it was the only thing he had in common with the other group mind members. They didn’t have his skull cap to genetically alter themselves with the same dexterity. That meant the nano would have to solve for rapidly thinning air, dropping temperature, and ultimately zero atmosphere. In all likelihood they would have to shift their bodies into dormancy. While the biological part of them slept, the mindchips and the nano-hive minds would continue to function, doing what they had to do to keep them alive.

  Even as Ferro was working on the problem on that track of his mind, the details of what was happening to him was coming to him by way of the group mind. About the essential nature of the tractor beam. It was in fact more of a laser beam, beaming digital instructions at his nano-net and mindchip, overriding both, hacking through them like butter. The beam was currently using his nano net to hollow out his body and to give it wings at the same time. His density was already that of a lighter-than air aerogel. The nano was being fed all the energy it needed to procure this transformation in record time and all the instructions it needed for procuring the magic.

  In moments, Ferro found himself flying up through the atmosphere and out, like angels leaving the planet after Judgement Day, after deciding the fate of souls for the Almighty. Those who would be taken and those who would be left behind. Even the metamorphosis trick he was trying to pull off of how to survive leaving the biosphere without a protective spacesuit had been solved for him. Once again, he doubted the Synthia group mind could have procured that kind of masterwork in the time remaining. Verge 99th floor Convergence Tech Wizards might not be as good as them individually, or even collectively, but they had evidently had a lot longer to work on this problem. It was evidently some kind of capture and imprison scenario for rogue Convergence Tech Wizards they couldn’t keep under their thumbs, or for those whom they simply feared runaway effects from. The fact that Verge would be ready with such a contingency spoke volumes as to the kind of company they were despite the image they presented to the public.

  Right now the only things lending credence to his concerns about the limits to the power of his own group mind was the fact that he was seeing other members besides him being lifted towards the ship in low orbit that was reeling them in. Then again these were pacifists for all their chest thumping. Who knew how much they were really resisting? Could such a small group mind have checkmated or at least stalemated Verge? He guessed he would never know.

  His mind was shutting down. He was going into hibernation. Apparently, this was all part of Verge’s master plan.

  Why wouldn’t Verge just kill them? Of course! Even Verge needed to hedge their bets against their own limitations. Perhaps Ferro and his friends would be brainwashed while in stasis, genetically manipulated in such a way that upon awakening they would no longer be themselves, but Verge puppets. The haunting thought was the last one to visit his mind as his higher brain shut down and he entered hibernation.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Monica and Ethan had been treated to a full dose of their own insecurities by way of the holo monitor in Jarod’s basement. Jarod and the two kids, Noah and Synthia had watched along with them, although for the threesome the footage constituted reruns. In their case, the shock value had held up to multiple replays. They looked as bombed out as when Monica and Ethan had first laid eyes on them. For the detective duo, seeing Johnson and Alexman sink two continents just to get the SEG—Synthia Engineered Group Mind—to give up their positions was beyond sickening, beyond even terrifying. Monica and Ethan had been treated to the full show. Synthia could give everyone in the room access to each of the player’s minds and their point of views better than the omniscient narrator of a good sci-fi story. She was quite a remarkable girl. Even disallowing for the fact that she was the one who had given rise to the group mind in the first place. She had been the prime mover. And it was still unclear to Monica and Ethan what all she could do.

  That might explain Monica’s shocking move.

  She had a gun held out and pointed at Synthia. “Even after all you’ve seen of what Verge is capable of,” Jarod said.

  “And what the group mind is capable of,” Monica said, tightening her grip around the gun, keeping her aim steadfastly aimed at the center of Synthia’s skull. “Techa only knows what she can do. She’s stronger than everyone in the group mind it was her job to protect put together. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  Jarod lowered his eyes. Ethan hoped Monica hadn’t picked up on the gesture in her peripheral vision. Techa knows, she had her full concentration on the girl and had no intention of looking away from her even for a split second.

  Noah stepped between Monica and Synthia. “The bullet will go through your head and into mine without even slowing,” Synthia said.

  Noah’s eyes went wide. He felt foolish. He covered. “Duh, I knew that. I just figured she’d think twice if handsome, innocent, yet-to-have-sex-yet me was deprived of the life I so richly deserve.”

  “She’s probably more worried about the billions of people drowned alive in Africa and the billions more who could join them if I get out of here alive,” Synthia said.

  Noah swallowed hard. “Well, duh, I knew that. Just that…” He faltered. “S
urely pathetic, helpless gestures still count for something in this world!”

  Ethan figured it was time for him to interject himself into the scene. “Monica, I get that the girl is a wild card, and possibly every bit as dangerous as Verge. But Verge is not a wild card. It’s pretty damn clear what they’re about. So worst case scenario, she’s no better. Best case scenario, she’s our best chance of countering Verge. Perhaps our one chance of countering them. We sure as hell aren’t going to solve this problem at our level.”

  Monica stood there processing. Her hands, both of them wrapped around the gun, and her arms, weren’t faltering. The product of nano-reinforcement? Or just grim determination?

  Finally, she lowered the gun. “Out of curiosity, how many ways could you have stopped the bullet before it got to you?” she asked Synthia.

  “I sense you really don’t want to know.”

  Monica sighed. “Got that right.”

  “Well, this is a fine pickle we find ourselves in,” Ethan said. “I blame you entirely,” he said to Monica. “If you were just happy to be my girlfriend instead of…” Monica glared back at him. He sighed. “Yeah, I suppose I had some small part to play in getting us here.” He stared at the floor and scratched the back of his head until his mind could find its way back to the seminal point he was trying to make. “That’s right, that’s what I was leading up to. Any idea what we’re going to do to hold Johnson and Axelman at bay?”