“Which is like the Chinese notion of yin and yang,” Purple interjected. “Yin being the immaterial aspect of the Godhead, the primordial ooze from which everything arises, that which is beyond definition and limits but that gives rise to the God-body, the material universe.”
“You see where you’re taking us, Albie,” Red said, tapping him on the back again, “down a whole new direction? One we would never have thought to go down if it weren’t for you.”
Albright wasn’t sure how he felt about that. On the one hand, he couldn’t deny the rush of the brainstorming session with the kids. He was flying high as a kite right now. As excited as they were with pressing on with this new field of inquiry. On the other hand, there was the Beach Ball Man, sentenced to an eternity of misery that would keep getting worse and worse. Albright was compounding the problem he created, not fixing it. “But what about Beach Ball Man,” he said. “What we’re doing to him is inhumane.”
“What, this asshole?” Red said. “The guy who ran over your kid and kept going? Like he deserves an ounce of consideration.”
“I suppose if you want to change someone’s compulsive behavior, like with any addict, you need them to bottom out,” Albright said. “Maybe if we accelerated his pace along that road he was on, he’d just bottom out all the sooner. Sooner or later the nuclear fusion reaction we’re creating with him of hate and anger and bile feeding on itself more and more will have no choice but to collapse in on itself, burst through to the other side, the way a black hole opens out to another universe, one of light and hope and positivity in his case.”
The kids were nodding around the table. “Nice” was coming out of a lot of mouths.
Red patted Albright on the back again. “Great way to reform incorrigible criminals, huh? And in the meantime they get to serve the greater good in a capacity far greater than the one you had in mind. Instead of saving one soul at a time, they might well be saving the entire planet as a psychic weapon used against a superior foe. Tell me you aren’t helping him undo his karma a thousandfold? This guy might just be reborn as a saint after what we do to him.”
More nods around the table.
Curious, Albright thought, that the SME wasn’t inside his head now, when he could have used him most to sort through the thorny edges of this moral and ethical dilemma he was facing with the Beach Ball man. An all too convenient absence that served Verge better perhaps than the alternative. Maybe the SME only helped resolve moral dilemmas when it served Verge’s purposes. The rest of the time Albright was going to be on his own. Right now the stakes seemed too high to ignore the gift horse he’d been presented with. “All right, I’m in,” he said.
Everyone else in the room cheered.
“You kids carry the ball for a while,” Albright said, “if you’ll pardon the expression. I’m going to go play with my daughter. After I’ve had a break, and come back to see what developments you’ve made with our new psychic weapon, it’s possible you’ll spark me into another fit of creativity.”
“That’s how it works around here,” Red said. “We all feed off one another, as much as we feed off our downtime.”
Albright smiled and headed for his daughter, thinking, “Maybe I’ve found a group mind that’s just more right for me.” Techa only knew the other one had gone silent. As if they’d cut the connection to him. The sting of betrayal just made his switching allegiance all the easier. It was possible their signal was being blocked by the faraday cage surrounding the labs inside the Verge building. But why would Verge block it? The more they knew about their adversary the better. No, Albright had been abandoned. Plain and simple. Perhaps the only thing that was plain and simple about this new arrangement.
THIRTY-THREE
Retro waited for the laughter to subside. “Okay, okay, an easy one. I’m lying out there, beyond the edges of the compound, far beyond, dying. We’re talking miserable death here, no nice way to die. You can hear me on the loudspeaker throughout every level and sublevel in the station. Amidst vague, ominous screaming, I’m begging, I’m pleading to be rescued, I’m crying, hysterical, gagging…
“Yeah, on my dick. To which I say, ‘No mercy!’” That was Tillman. Complete ass, but that was another story.
Retro put his face in pause with a sarcastic smile stretched across it waiting for the laughing and ribbing to die down yet again. Then, continuing with his What-If scenario unabated, “You think I might be spitting up blood from the sounds of me. You send Cheryl to rescue me because the rest of your callous fucks aren’t about to interrupt your eight-hour-behind-the-times-from-Earth broadcast of the Phillies playing the World Series…”
“Got that right.” That was Cooper. At least he thought it was Cooper, he was still trying to get their names straight. It didn’t help that everyone looked a different shade of olive, from the Hispanics that included Cubans, Mexicans, Spaniards and Dominican Republicans, to the Filipinos and Chinese and Koreans and… If he didn’t know better he’d say they were all fleeing minority oppression back on Earth to make a better world for themselves, or at least to ensure the whites never got the upper hand again—on any other planet. As for himself, he was Lebanese. His close-cropped black, kinky hair, and plunging forehead, with its bushy eyebrows providing better shade than an oak tree, probably made him—and the rest of them—more suitable to colonizing Venus than this planet with its weaker sun.
The latest laughs at Cooper’s weak-ass comment echoed on. Retro once again waited for them to settle down. “But even more ominously, Cheryl never returns.” He made Twilight Zone soundtrack noises to emphasize the beat. “What do you do?”
“You’re right. This is an easy one. Wait for the Phillies game to finish,” Bergman said. Comment followed by laughs. “Send the robot after the both of you. If the robot doesn’t come back, declare the entire zone off limits. Memorial services at eleven.” Clapping followed his remarks this time. Retro remembered Bergman’s name with a little alliterative assistance; Bergman was the one with the big bulbous nose, and the belly to match.
Retro just shook his head slowly in disbelief. “You’re all hopeless. Did you not take even one class, count ’em one—” he said, holding up his index finger, “of Utilitarian ethics in college?”
“We’re corporate, dude. I think they teach ethics as what not to do if you get in trouble.” That was Cheryl. Ex-Chinese dissident. Current Mars dissident. Almond shaped eyes, divinely shaped lips, oval shaped head that collaborated with the rest of her face to procure perennially sassy expressions.
“Got that right,” Cooper said butting beer mugs with her in a toast to his own stupidity.
“Not that I can get past the idea of me coming after you,” Cheryl said burping the beer. “In what wet dream?”
“All of them, actually,” Retro said—to weak laughs—“but that discussion for another day. All right, one last one before I face the Martian expanse of endless red dirt like the exclamation point it is to the already sick joke of my life.” He panned his head around the lunch room to make sure he had everyone’s undivided attention. They were mostly staring at their beer mugs. Close enough. “The alarm sounds. A deafening, sickening sound. You can barely hear yourself think. Except for, ‘What asshole figured that an alarm frying your brain was the best way to deal with an emergency?’ You run to your terminals, start checking the banks of security cameras one after the other, and what do you find but…”
“Wait for it,” Cooper said. “I love these pregnant pauses.” He chuckled at his own joke. “Damn nice of someone to send us a drama queen to break up the monotony of slave labor, where the only bosses to bitch to are on a whole other planet.” Cooper got a “Hear! Hear!” and another bit of beer mug knocking from Cheryl.
They sounded like a group of roughnecks and drank like them too, Retro thought, but they were all scientists. They might have felt like coal miners waiting for the canary to sing most days, but that didn’t change the fact that their slave labor was of an entirely mental nature. At
least the poor bastard swinging a pickaxe in a coal mine can let his mind wander wherever the hell he wants. Try that up here and the alarms would go off for real, signaled by their neural nano nets or their mindchips or any of a hundred other ways Corporate HQ had to keep an electronic eye on you. Like Cheryl said, not exactly the place to come if you were overcome with a strong sense of ethics.
Retro said, “What do you find on the monitors with the alarms going off like crazy but…” picking his story up from where he’d left off as if he’d never been interrupted, “a breakout of some kind on the third sub-level. You don’t know what it is exactly, you just know everyone’s down for the count. And I mean nobody is getting up. You quarantine the floor, like the sensible scientists you are. Reroute the air exchange, run it through like all the scrubbers in place for this situation. What then?”
Cooper shrugged. “I tell you what we don’t do. We don’t report it back to Earth. They’ll assume we didn’t isolate ourselves in time or didn’t do it correctly. They’re not going to take the chance of something that lethal getting out. They’ll just snuff the rest of us and send in another team to recoup whatever caused the outbreak for their war efforts. Pray to Techa the one thing the Martian colony was able to offer up to pay for itself was the ultimate war weapon.”
He got another toast from Cheryl and another “Hear! Hear!”
“But what about the families of your fellow dead scientists?! Don’t they have a right to know?” Retro blurted managing to sound indignant, condescending, impatient, and scolding all in one.
“Shit no!” Bergman exclaimed. “Then we can’t cash the deceased’s electronic checks, sign them over to ourselves, say it’s to pay off gambling debts. They know how we love to gamble up here. No one will ever question it.” Strangely, he got more understanding head nods than laughs from people taking him entirely seriously.
“You don’t even know it’s some deadly pandemic!” Retro continued. “Could just be a malfunction in the air flow system sucking all the air out of there. In fact, if you move fast enough you might still be able to save them.”
“This group? We can’t decide on what socks to wear to work in the morning in less than an hour. And that’s before you put the whole thing to a debate.” Cheryl again. She was the smartest of the bunch, but tended to sound the most jaded. Retro wasn’t sure if she was talking from experience or just a less-than-sanguine character disposition.
Retro huffed. “Fine. I give up, for now. I’m done socializing you mooks. You’ll have to hope your lower brain functions are enough to keep you going until I get back and can possibly reboot your higher brains.”
“Ha-ha!” Cheryl said not looking up from her chessboard, making a move against Cooper.
Cooper whispered to Cheryl, “He’s right though. I swear the way you play chess, it’s like no higher brain activity implied.”
“I just like to watch them die.”
Cooper groaned. He threw a “Hurry back, mate,” at Retro on his way out the door.
***
Retro drove the ATV across the rugged Martian terrain towards the compound, returning to base after an eight-hour shift. He so hated leaving tracks out here he’d confined himself to going back and forth over the same ones. He’d even managed to trace a mandala shape in the red sand and rock, which was very Zen of him, he thought. That way, if he wanted to go out for a ride, he could retrace the diagram, and it would clear the cobwebs from his head. At least that was the idea behind the hedge mazes they designed around castles in Europe of old. He figured there had to be something to the idea, because he did feel remarkably less attached to his problems after driving the mandala many times over. He sure as hell wasn’t going to get a hedge maze out here, not for some time. So the mandala would have to do.
As he reached the entrance to the compound and saw the modest opening to the outside world, little more than an earthen mound, he bemoaned the fact that they were confined to living here like rats. The earth provided them the necessary radiation shielding. It protected them also from the cold and heat extremes and the desert sandstorms that could rage for weeks on the surface. Whatever they could build on the surface, however fast they could build it, would always remain fragile by comparison.
Now that Retro had joined the crew, he had high hopes of ruggedizing surface dwellings to get them living on the surface over the next few years, despite the dangers. He, for one, couldn’t stand feeling buried alive that living below ground amounted to. But he was their only CTW. The others, all scientific giants in their own fields, doing pioneering work to push the boundaries of their specialties were nonetheless working at a snail’s pace compared to what a Convergence Tech Wizard could do. Their mindchips were filled with algorithms that scoured the fledgling mindnet for breakthroughs in related fields that could advance their endeavors. The STWs—Standard Tech Wizards—used those breakthroughs to modest effect. But they seemed to lack whatever gene was responsible for seeing the true potential synergies formerly unrelated fields had to offer one another.
He chuckled, realizing he had used the term Mindnet for the first time. Now that the Internet reached Mars, the term Mindnet was gradually replacing it; the idea being that they were slowly upgrading the intelligence throughout the cosmos, making it one big mind that trafficked information. By the time the internet reached the other planets and moons and asteroids in the solar system, he imagined, the term “Mindnet” would have all but replaced the Internet.
Retro drove his ATV into the mouth of the cave, watched as the smart-gate closed behind him. They’d had to invest it with a certain intelligence because it had to know when to close itself in response to a storm outside, or a solar flare against which Mars had no defense, lacking the magnetosphere that Earth had to repel the hyper-energized particle bombardment. And depending on the size of the storm in question, or the nature of the bombardment from outside, it may well have to reinforce itself on the fly. Its frame was a robot crane that could assemble the extra shielding the 3D printers spit out for it as needed. The door could also perform maintenance on itself, a handy feature, being as Martian sand and dirt had a way of getting inside everything and gumming up the works.
Retro took the elevator down just three floors. Appreciating the fact that he didn’t have to peel off a spacesuit first or a head filtration unit. The Rover, with its enclosed cabin, handled atmospheric filtration outside for him. He probably should have worn a face unit in any case, at the very least, but there was one in the rover, and call him a drama queen for preferring to make a mad grab for it in an emergency rather than feel that thing on his face all day.
The compound extended down six floors and counting. The robot excavators and 3D printers worked around the clock expanding the complex. There was no such thing as too much room. They needed space for more colonists, more labs for more experiments, more equipment for more specialized purposes. Just giving the 3D printers room to repopulate themselves and spit out whatever other devices they needed was an achievement. Equipment was still more important than people, and that included the various specialized robots the 3D printers could spit out. But, of course, before they could spit out anything, they needed to be fed their nutrient stocks. Thus robots were always mining the earth here and elsewhere to ensure that the printers had everything they needed. Mostly they needed earth and little more, their nanobots highly proficient at turning simple silicon and other base compounds into whatever they needed. Thanks to the primitive lifeforms that had once lived around submerged volcanic vents in the ocean and that had since been adapted to the purposes of providing 3D printing ink. The bacterial cells that lived off regolith could be made to turn it into most any structure you liked.
There was a whole line of 3D printers that could produce whatever you needed just off of electricity, relying on energy-feeding microbes who could feed off of current directly to work their magic. So this line of 3D printers cranked out solar panels and wind turbines the livelong day to feed themselves, or more specif
ically to supply the ink—made up of these mutated energy-feeding microbes. There were also poles reaching high into the sky that could make energy simply off of reacting with the atmosphere and then pipe the captured electrons down the pole to the direct current-feeding bacteria.
The elevator doors opened on Sub-Level 3 and Retro’s eyes went wide. All the scientists lay passed out on the floor, or collapsed at their desks.
Blood and other bodily fluids oozed out of virtually every orifice. No one was breathing. It was a fair bet they were all dead.
Retro reflexively reached for a gas mask—usually used in conjunction with this or that experiment—though he knew if whatever it was that got his fellow scientists was airborne, it was too late for him. He went around checking for pulses at the neck just in case his eyes weren’t a reliable enough data source. The ritual was every bit the waste of time he expected it to be.
He ran an atmospheric analysis. The system ran itself actually, twenty-four-seven. All he did was check the display. There was an airborne particulate which shouldn’t have been there all right. Or depending on how you looked at it, it was the only thing which should have been there, considering it was local to Mars. It was one of the primitive bacterial strands they’d been studying from a source in the regolith nearby. It was why the compound had been sited here. There were a lot of people back on earth that got terribly excited about microbial life. Retro wasn’t one of them. But he wished he was now.
With a little less feigned interest than usual, he examined the work the other scientists were doing on the microbe. Quickly going over whatever facet of the problem each of them was working on. Running all this through his optical mindchip at light speed. The chip in turn had already hacked into their computers to get the results of their work. They had apparently isolated a RNA-strand that had gotten everyone enthralled. They were seeing what they could do with it, inserting it into various forms of microbial life when one of those microbes gave it a way to eat through the containment chamber they were experimenting with it in and gave it access to the atmosphere.
Convergence_ The Time Weavers Page 20
