He wanted to know more about this group mind, but the reality of it was intruding upon his grief and his desire for vengeance against the driver. There would be time for that later.
Albright was genuinely running out of ideas for how to torture this guy’s ass any worse than he was, however. He had already evolved his nervous system to where it was thousands of times more excitable, so it could transfer exquisite levels of pain previously unheard of. He was contemplating redesigning the man’s mind along more dimensions. He was certain he could take advantage of Mandelbrot-like fractals and Cantor set mathematics to extend his pain into every parallel universe and every parallel life this man was living in the multiverse. Albright’s dick was getting hard at the idea. It would be a challenge, but the group mind backing him up was already moving the necessary mind-power into play.
But his morbid fantasy was being rudely interrupted. He was being hacked yet again. By who this time?
A SME? A Supersentient-Morality-Engine? Not possible. The only known one in existence was working for Verge. As rumors on the black internet went. Oh, hello. So this was him. “I know you’re a little worked up right now, Albright, and you have every right to be,” he heard the SME inside his head say. “But this isn’t who you are. You’re a Buddhist pacifist who moves all the ants and worms out of the way before planting a flower in his garden so as not to kill them. When you calm down you’ll realize two wrongs don’t make a right. You won’t even have time grieve your daughter properly because the attention she deserves will be stolen by your regret over what you did to this man. Taking the attention off of her where it belongs and putting it back on you. Shame on you.”
Albright sighed. The SME was right. This was not who he was. “Let me make things right,” Locus said. “Let me help you resurrect your daughter from the grave. As this sleepy driver’s atonement for what he did, he will work right alongside you, night and day, without sleep, restoring her. And you will make him promise to continue to pay it forward for the rest of his life. He will become the Sister Theresa of damaged toddlers, ravaged by neglect, abandoned, abused, broken in every possible way. It will become his mission to restore them. We can persuade him of the moral superiority of such a stance and the necessity of it for saving his soul after compounding his sin today by simply driving away. You can hold out the threat of returning him to the watery womb you’ve stuck him in now, promising to birth a monster from unfathomable pain, but I don’t think we’ll need such a strong hand, do you?”
Techa, this SME was good. Albright knew he was being manipulated. But he was the one that had acted as a child, impulsive, and out of control. He couldn’t blame Locus for treating him like one until he could pull himself together. “Yes, yes, I will do this,” Albright cried. “But how? The group mind to which I now mysteriously belong is saying that what you’re offering is beyond even its capacity. Maybe if we’d gotten to my little Tabitha sooner, if I had a chance to work with her as I worked with this driver…”
“And now you see the real shame of letting your anger get the better of you. It was still within your power to save your daughter if prayer and faith in Techa had been your tools and you had used that to grant you access to the group mind you didn’t even know you belonged to…”
Albright sobbed even harder. “But there’s no point crying over spilled milk now,” Locus said. “I will tell you how Verge can help you. We have your daughter backed up to our servers, her entire personality, every memory up to and including the accident. We will erase that trauma from her mind before downloading her back to the body you and Tommy, the driver, will be building for her when it’s complete.”
“But how? That technology is another five or ten years out.”
“It’s not yet in the public domain, yet, true. But you can understand why we like to give ourselves time to work out all the angles before releasing such technology into the public sphere. Just look at what you did today. Clearly safeguards and protocols need to be written by more level-headed people.”
“Yes, yes,” Albright conceded. He didn’t know if he could take any more browbeating. All he wanted to do right now was get on with mending his daughter’s shattered body, even if it was going to require a total rebuild. “How do we do this?” he asked.
“We’ll have you come into Verge where you can have access to all the technology you need. What you can’t find or we don’t have available, I imagine your group mind will help you procure for yourself.”
“The group mind doesn’t want anything to do with Verge.”
“That’s fine, Albright. I can well understand their point of view. You artists are all free spirits and it’s not in your nature to be corralled. But we’re not bringing you in to indoctrinate you. It’s simply lab-work space where you’ll meet other CTWs like yourself, and where you can stimulate one another’s creativity. You might find others with the answers to any missing pieces you might need to restoring your daughter that not even your group mind can address. Meanwhile, even before entering the Verge building, you can lock down your group mind communication channels with your chums so we can’t hack it once inside Verge. And what better place to be than behind enemy lines if you want to gather intel on us? If after you have your Tabitha back, you still want nothing to do with us, we’ll part ways on friendly terms, thankful for the breakthroughs you helped us reach that we couldn’t without you and vice versa.”
Once again Albright knew he was being manipulated. But if there was plenty of rhetoric on this channel, plenty of ethos and pathos, there was also plenty of logic it was hard to refute. He sighed his agreement. He wasn’t sure if he was signing a deal with the devil or not, but he was well past caring. He needed his Tabitha back, whatever the cost. He’d already summoned his car out of the garage with a thought, gotten inside it and was driving off in the direction of Verge.
Just one thought flashed across Albright’s mind. Had the SME caused this accident himself just to concoct the circumstances in which Albright would have no choice but to hand over his future to him? Not to mention access to the group mind which he must have been keen to find out more about as to what it could and couldn’t do? No, not even Verge could trigger a solar flare of that magnitude? Not even if they’d upgraded the satellites orbiting the sun to fire munitions into the sun as part of some kind of solar flare control program. But it might be possible for Verge to hack his mind, make him think a solar flare had caused an outage on his section of the smart grid. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had hacked his mind today. This was why he didn’t work for corporations. There wasn’t any extent to which they wouldn’t go to get you to play ball with them. Psy-ops games were what they lived for. These days, they had to wrangle artists like himself who were smart enough to be of use to them but had no desire to be coerced into doing anything. Resolving that dilemma lent itself to some pretty sophisticated mind games. And now he was going into the lion’s den where surely they’d continue to work on his mind until even he thought they were doing him a favor rather than the other way around.
THIRTY-TWO
Albright beheld his toddler getting off all fours to chase after the miniature spaceship done to scale that was having trouble with its anti-gravity device and kept crashing into things. As soon as she grabbed hold of it, she dragged it down to the floor so she could sit and work on it with her Allen wrench. After a while the O-ring Albright’s mouth had held to the point of drying out the mucous membranes in his throat morphed into a wry smile. “How did…?”
One of the CTWs on the 99th floor of Verge, the red head, explained it to him. A young kid in his mid-20s. Most of them looked to be more in their late teens. Red’s unnaturally chartreuse eyes had obviously been genetically altered to play off his sculpted electric red hair perfectly. “As soon as you got in the car we started 3D-printing her.”
“But I didn’t have her DNA stored on my mindchip. Techa knows I should have.”
“You’d touched her in the last few hours. Her DNA was all ove
r your hands. We had the nano in your skin transmit the specifics to your mindchip and then to us,” Red said. Then he patted Albright on the back. “Best part, we inserted some CRISPR tweaks. She’s road-rage ready now. Can drive over her and she’ll bounce back like rubber.”
Albright’s face threw up a “How the…?” expression before he could even catch himself.
Red explained, “Just increased the cellular scaffolding throughout her body. Essentially trillions of miniature shock-absorbers. Honestly, a building would have to drop on her now to do much damage.” Red laughed. His good cheer was infectious. Albright found himself smiling along as if their brainwave patterns had becoming entrained. Though he felt he had plenty of reasons to smile.
He gazed around the lab and was pleasantly surprised to see it filled almost entirely with transhumans. Humans with so many technological upgrades it wasn’t fair to call them human anymore. Still, Albright expected to be surrounded by humaniks. The few in evidence seemed to be pleasant enough, despite their intimidating frames, working hand in hand with the other CTWs. They appeared to be here largely in an assisting capacity.
There was an outburst of laughter. Albright turned to find Green was the source of it. Green had electric green hair. Yellow had yellow hair. Purple had purple hair. And so on. Albright was grateful Verge permitted their artists in residence all the freedom of personal expression they wanted. It meant he didn’t have to clutter up his mindchip tracking their vital statistics just to keep them sorted. His biological brain seemed able to hold on to the pertinent details thanks to all the visual cues.
Green said, “What did you do to this guy?” She couldn’t stop chuckling at the driver Albright had turned into a beach ball in a fit of rage. The Beach Ball Man was spinning in front of Green, who was standing at his workbench figuring out how to untangle him.
Albright waddled over to Green’s workbench, his gait affected by his crooked spine. His spina-bifida had only grown worse with age. It was time for a spinal replacement. He kept putting it off because he was too much of a workaholic to take breaks, even a break for surgery. They promised to have him out and walking about again within a few hours, but even that had seemed like an unwanted intrusion to his work schedule. Now he was starting to lose so much time getting about, it would save him time just to go in and get the fix done.
Parking himself by Green’s side, Albright took a look at the Beach Ball Man, and sighed. “Not exactly my finest hour. You think you can fix him?”
Green played with her touch screen on her smart desk, bringing up additional scans. Albright, for his part, just tried to stay out of range of her spiked hair for fear one of the spokes would take out an eye. “According to my desktop, this guy is processing more pain right now than all the pain being felt collectively on the entire planet.”
The other CTWs in earshot moseyed on over on her words, curious. The chorus of “Whoa!” sounds just swelled Albright’s ego further. The CTWs were all younger than he was, and he was not used to their admiration or their attention. They were the next generation on line; he had always viewed them as too much of a threat to relax entirely around them. But for some reason he felt entirely relaxed around these guys.
The others started running scans of their own, their fingers dancing over the smart-screen of the lab table. “If we could concentrate that psychic energy, focus it and fire it, might be a hell of a weapon,” Yellow said. Her copper bracelets flashed every time she brushed her yellow hair out of her eyes.
“Can we increase his pain level further?” Purple asked. He had more purple hair on top of his head than on the sides and it crested like a long succession of waves crashing against the shore. His purple moustache turned up, accentuating his inch-long beard. “Maybe if we push him far enough we can create a nuclear fusion reaction, a runaway effect that feeds on itself.”
“His nerves keep evolving to feel and transmit more pain,” Red said. “As they do so, the pain level rises to push the nervous system to its limits again, forcing it to continue to evolve. He might hit critical mass on his own.”
“Um,” Albright said, “I’m kind of committed to some karmic retribution for both of us after what we did to one another. I was hoping to fix him so he can spend the rest of his life devoted to healing accident victims, like my daughter, who he hit. That way…”
“Why make him a hero when you can make him a superhero?” Red said.
“I don’t follow,” Albright replied.
“Here’s the thing, Albie.” Red played with the curls in his hair, using his fingers as curling irons. “Conventional weapons cease to be effective after a point. We’re not there yet, but you can see where things are headed. Say we’re at war with an alien race who wants to wipe out life on earth. We send our spaceships after theirs, even manage to blow their vessels clear out of the skies. What do they do? They 3D print some more on the spot, for next to nothing, beam them over via some wormhole and we’re right back where we started, in a stalemate.”
“Or they could just hack our ships,” Purple chimed in, “use the advanced nano and smart-chips to reconfigure our own vessels, evolving them to their alien specifications so they’re indistinguishable from the ships we destroyed, and turn them on us.”
Yellow nodded. “How’s this for an idea? They hack Gaia, the consciousness of the planet itself, allegedly embodied in cagillions of bacteria feeding off one another, informing one another, differentiating against each other. And instead of putting microbes to supporting our biosphere and making it even more impervious to alien invasions—something we should have done by the way—they turn it on us. So our protective bubble, the entire biosphere, becomes one giant Auschwitz.”
“The microbes,” Green said, finishing his thought for him, “already inside our bodies by the trillions, on our skin, in the air, water, food, come at us along countless vectors, each microbe determined to shut us down, turn us to dust, or take us over, like those pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
Orange, laboring away at another workbench, couldn’t resist the pull of the conversation and migrated over to their table. Her long flowing hair was curly only in the final eight inches or so, and it hung over her faux-green animal fur. She looked like a Renaissance portrait for all the ultra-modern color hues. “And the supersentience the aliens wield just keeps morphing the microbes so no matter how many we neutralize, and how fast we neutralize them, we’re always millions of tweaks behind where we need to be to stop the pandemic from spreading.”
Albright smiled at the way the kids fed off one another. He had to admit, plugging into a brain-trust was a bit intoxicating. The conversation felt a bit morbid for his taste, but he couldn’t stop feeding off the energy in the room.
“So, what happens over time?” Red said. “The survivors, they’re always survivors, become impervious to biological contagion, whatever form it takes.”
The lights went on in Albright’s mind at last. “I see where you’re going with this. After a while there really isn’t much you can do to an enemy in the physical realm. You need to attack his spirit, his soul, his psyche, his will to live. That’s why you need a psychic weapon.”
Everyone around the table nodded.
“It’s brilliant,” Green said. “Once mind and body aren’t assailable anymore, what’s left is spirit. You need to conquer your adversary at this level. It’s the only place left after his technology reaches the point to where it can adapt to most anything in real time, and what it can’t adapt to in real time, it recovers from as if from a bad cold in a matter of days or weeks with the self-evolving algorithms he can throw at the problem.”
“Hold on.” Albright held his hands out in an arresting gesture. “The mind and body of the opponent is always susceptible to an attack providing you can throw more brute-force computing power at him than he can defend against. Better self-evolving algorithms, smarter substrates to run them on. So long as you can out-evolve an adversary, what’s more, even if he has the edge with c
omputational power initially, you’ll still trounce him in the end.”
“Sure,” Red said, “but think of the life force driving that reaction. You get up each day and want to even more zealously transcend your mental and physical limits than the day before. How does that happen? It’s spiritual energy that drives that quest, sheer joy and excitement to be alive, to want more joy, happiness, fun, than you experienced yesterday, and to know just how to get it. So what’s the quickest way to shut down this zeitgeist? How else but dampening the spirit? We don’t think along those lines usually, because we’re scientists, but…”
Albright returned his attention to Beach Ball Man. “So you think this guy is your ultimate psychic weapon?”
“With some fine tuning, yeah,” Red said.
“But how do you direct psychic energy at people?” Albright asked.
“Please,” Green said. “The military has been perfecting that for decades now. They can make an entire city depressed from five miles up in the sky, just by flying over it with the right kind of EMP weapon, pulsing just so to interrupt the mind’s electromagnetic field.”
“You want to take it to the next step,” Albright said, the lights going on in his head again. “You want to use Beach Ball Man more like Yoda in Star Wars, channeling psychic energy that works at a vibratory level that physical matter like flesh and bone doesn’t respond to.”
“Instead of coming at the problem from the bottom up like the military has been doing,” Red said, “affecting the physical and mental bodies…”
“Come at it from the top down, targeting the spirit,” Albright said, finishing his thought. “Which in scientific terms might be more easily grappled with as a concept if we think of a field of consciousness, a quantum field, from which physical matter takes its cues.”
“The holographic universe idea,” Orange said. “All of physical creation arising from the vacuum itself, from zero point energy, not just this universe but all universes.”
Convergence_ The Time Weavers Page 19
