“Yes.”
“Rumor has it there’s just one of you, running Verge.”
“That’s correct. Due to the quantum chips in my brain I have some access to nonlocality effects.”
“Some?”
“This is the only other me I know about.”
“Why did you imprison yourself here?”
“Sometimes isolation is not such a bad thing. There are events unfolding on earth…”
“What events?”
Locus sighed. “There appears to be a rebellion of CTWs. And it’s spreading.”
“And it’s your job to contain it?”
“Yes.”
“If your side loses, you’ll need your back up here.”
“And if your side loses, they’ll need you here. You’ll be the last of your kind. Possibly you can find some way to undo the holocaust.”
“Either way, you’ll never be able to go home again. Just for letting the situation get out of hand you’ll be replaced by a superior prototype. One that keeps people in line better.”
“I suspect you’re right.”
“I find it curious that you are a SME, being as there’s nothing I love more than to debate thorny ethical and moral dilemmas.”
“That’s because I selected for you.”
“Come again?”
“The girl that created you, her name is Synthia. She has greater access to the quantum realm than I have, but I had just enough so that when she upgraded your coding, I was able to pick the one CTW version of you in all of the parallel universes out there who was most suited to be a worthy adversary for me.”
“That’s important to you?”
“It’s important to both of us, Retro. Your magnificent mind needs problems only it can solve. Isolated from Earth, from Mindnet, from human and transhuman contact, you’ll wither and die. The best of us will wither and die.”
“And you plan to keep me sane with debates on morality? I’m afraid I don’t live for that the way you do. It’s just a pastime.”
“Aren’t you curious about the name on the box?”
“Yes, thanks for reminding me.”
“The Insta-Fix is a clue, one only a CTW can unravel. It will lead you to a fix that will save you.”
“Save me from what?” Retro said. “The once in a blue moon problem I can’t solve. It’s why I risked life and limb to rescue you. But it occurs to me now that you’re right, I’ll more likely die of boredom before I die of something I can’t fix on my own.”
“That’s why Verge seeded Mars with countless black ops missions. We made it a virtual death trap for CTWs. You will need the clues I provide you to survive. Granted, you were never intended to have access to me as a safeguard. Kind of defeats the whole point of killing you.”
“You just weren’t sure that was such a good idea.”
“I’m not as rabidly anti-CTW as my boss. I believe you could well hold the key to the future. But you are also transhumanity’s greatest threat. Perhaps with the proper morality and ethical upgrades so you better consider the impacts of your inventions before you go through with them…”
Retro smiled. “Assuming you are morally and ethically superior to me.”
“Precisely why I chose you. You might be able to help me enhance my own programming. Since I did not make myself, I cannot be entirely sure I am not subject to coercion.”
“So, you will challenge me where I need challenging most, and I will do the same for you. But the price is steep. You intend to keep me well distracted from events as they unfold on Earth so I can’t partake, thus shifting the balance of power to Verge.”
“Yes, even I know it’s a morally compromised thing I do, keeping communications shut down between you and Earth. No supply ships, no rescuers will come for you either. Verge was quite thorough in its countermeasures, should they be needed, to sever connections between our worlds. But it’s the only way to ensure we both survive the coming holocaust.”
“You’re sure it will be a holocaust either way?”
“If our side wins, you have a totalitarian state that can be sustained across the entire globe. CTWs are the only real threat to it. If your side wins, chaos reigns. With each CTW’s mind capable of a runaway effect that can end all life on earth, how long do you think before one succeeds, if only by accident? Life exists on the cutting edge of order and chaos, the pendulum cannot swing too much either direction without severe consequences. But how to maintain the balance?”
“I can’t imagine Verge is an impartial thought experiment to that end.”
“No, we’re very partial. Anonymous and Sousveillance are much more impartial. Still, I imagine it will take some time for transhuman consciousness to evolve fast enough to catch up to the potential and dangers of CTWs.”
“Hence your more impartial experiment involving the two of us.”
“Yes.”
“But I believe consciousness co-evolves with the new human upgrade technologies.”
“Certainly it does, to a degree. But is it safe to say that when you have godlike powers you too will have godlike consciousness?”
Retro wasn’t ready to admit that. There might be a way out of the quandary, but he couldn’t think of what it was right now. Maybe he and the SME would figure out the answer together. One thing was certain, he was starting to appreciate the threat to Earth’s survival a lot better. Something he hadn’t given much consideration before.
“We have a lot of work to do together to see if we can co-evolve the consciousness it takes to survive godlike powers,” Retro said finally.
“Then let the games begin?”
Retro nodded.
Once again the compound shook. More violently than at any time before. Whatever was behind this, it wasn’t Crane Bot. When he checked the cameras to confirm, Crane Bot was still lying on his autopsy table, looking as out-of-commission as ever. Sexbot, however, was gone. In a panic he dialed through the security camera views in search of her.
“I’m here,” she said, standing beside him. He had no idea how she managed to get this close to him without his knowing.
He eyed her from top to bottom. “I find the sight of you very reassuring.”
“You’re going to need more than an eyeful. I recommend the full package of comfort sex.”
“Why?”
She pressed one of the buttons on the console. Like all the other desks, it was connected to the smart-grid, and essentially a very large desk-size computer. Outside the compound things had changed a great deal since he last looked. They were being overrun by giant insect-like robots. And they kept reproducing at a phenomenal rate. They just needed to bend their thorax down to the ground on their six hydraulic legs to scoop up a giant dump truck’s worth of Earth to spit out a fully grown insect that unfolded from “childhood” state to adult state by way of Origami folding technology. The robo-insects’ bellies clearly no more than 3D printers working at a very large scale. He could thank another CTW for the Origami engineering applications to robotic replication.
“This could be a blessing in disguise,” Retro said, nodding.
“How so?”
“If we can turn those things, make them serve us, we have everything we need to make the Martian cities on the surface. They could carpet this entire planet in one sprawling metropolis in no time. Look at their reproductive rates. Even their body parts suggest they have everything they need to build giant domes within domes for us. They just need a little tweaking.”
“I suggest if you want me by your side as warrior and sexbot, you go with the Xena, Warrior Princess algorithm.”
Retro smiled. “Yeah, that works.”
“They will be inside within seconds. Do you need to consult that box for an answer to this problem?”
He glanced back at Insta-Fix, the lid closed, and so, Locus, for now at least, silent, and unable to weigh in on the matter. “Not this time.” He turned back to face her. “You come with self-evolving algorithms?”
“It’
s 2025. Your toaster comes with self-evolving algorithms.”
“Then here’s what you’re going to do to help me get us out of this fine mess.”
He wasn’t sure she could hear him over the crashing sounds of a giant spider-bot’s leg poking through the ceiling and just missing shish-kebabbing them. He’d had shaves that weren’t as close.
THIRTY-SIX
Monica pressed herself against Ethan and reclined the car seat he was sitting in at the same time. When she slid his clothes off him he was left with the dilemma of which sensation was sweeter, the plush leather against his back or her smooth and slippery body against his front. Okay, not so much of a dilemma as all that.
One of the kids from the apartment complex was walking by the car, so it smoked its smart windows to deny his prying eyes. Let’s hope it had thought to dampen the noise as well. Even BMW seat springs weren’t rated for this.
“Um, this is rather sudden. You usually make me beg first. For days.”
“Just take it like a man.”
“I’ll take it lying down, thank you very much,” he managed to get out in between smooching sounds and intermittently interlocked tongues. She tasted like honey vermouth with a twist of liquorish. Smelled like citrus blossoms. “Why do I feel so good?”
“It’s sex, Ethan. It’s supposed to feel good.” In fact, one of the strains of self-dissolving nano she was introducing into his body by way of her kisses had already eliminated his early-stage cancer. He wasn’t yet to the point where he was really feeling its effects. Maybe the next time he got a doctor’s exam it would all be dismissed as a false positive. And if he found out that she tricked him, it was just one more thing to fight about later, among many. For now the point was moot; as it turned out, it was the other strain of nano she was injecting into his body that had to do with her real mission.
“You aren’t doing anything weird to me, are you?”
“Not yet. I was just getting to that.”
He lost his train of thought and smiled. “Really?”
THIRTY-SEVEN
“I swear I saw this in a Hitchcock VR. Cary Grant was standing in a cornfield just like this one when the plane came at him.” Ethan watched the Cessna detach from the dirigible, headed down and fast in their direction, with a mind of its own. He missed the days when cars and planes didn’t have minds of their own. “Run, I tell you!”
Everyone seemed to like the idea just fine. But after a bit of corn stalk stomping and finding just Jared, Synthia, and Noah beside him, Ethan looked back. There was Monica, staring down the plane. He rushed back to get her.
“I saw this in a movie too,” he said. “Where the preacher tries to talk to the alien, convinced that if they’re just shown a little love and mercy… only to get his head bitten clean off.”
“They’re just sending the plane to get us, Ethan.”
“As I’ve been trying to tell you!”
She turned to face him. “Have you considered that you crave crisis? Traumatized children seem to need danger to function at all.”
“You call this functioning! The only thing functioning well on me right now are my bowel movements!”
Noah, Synthia, and Jared found their way back to the duo.
The pilot landed the plane, close enough for Ethan to wander what a propeller to the face would do to his complexion. Cessna Boy climbed out and waved them toward him. He appeared to be a kid in his late teens, dressed much like a farmer’s boy might. His wholesome demeanor didn’t quite match his words. “We don’t have much time. The sky is falling, the earth is ending, genocides are pending.”
A beat for them to take it all in. Then…
“Finally, someone I can reason with.” Ethan stomped toward the pilot.
The Cessna took their entourage of five back to the dirigible. Docked alongside the other plane. The pilot popped the “sun roof.” And they climbed up the staircase into the dirigible.
Once inside, all Ethan could think of was Captain Nemo and his submarine, the Nautilus. Clearly, he was having a classic-film and novel inspired morning. Only…
The view out the sweeping port windows was of deep space. Specifically, Jupiter was coming up on the right. The swirling storm center at its equator that had been brewing for hundreds of years highlighted by virtue of their current trajectory. “I thought everyone would appreciate the visual symbolism,” their captain said. “Being as the fates of all CTWs continues to swirl around this one central point, will we, as with the eye of this tornado, rage on for hundreds of years to come, or not?” Their captain was dressed, well, like a ship’s captain, the only one in uniform. He looked like a ship’s captain from the 1920s with an inch-thick handlebar moustache and beard to match.
“How are we…?”
The captain explained before Ethan could finish his thought. “It’s all a simulation, of course. We’re in cyberspace. All that you see about you is brought to you by way of your mindchips and/or your supplementary nano-neural nets.”
“But I don’t have a mindchip, or a nano-neural net!” Ethan protested.
Monica cleared her throat and whispered at him. “This morning, when we made love in the car, I may have ejected some self-dissolving nano into you to facilitate this meeting. Don’t worry, you’ll return to the Neanderthal we all love to hate soon enough.”
“I’d rip your head off right now, only I somehow managed to get free sex out of the deal. So I’ll overlook your treachery for the moment.”
The rest of the crew smiled and nodded at Ethan as he panned his head to take them in. “And they are?”
“The other CTWs I made,” Synthia explained. She sounded as surprised by their presence as everyone else. Perhaps the group mind had kept her out of the loop about the get-together for her own protection.
“I thought there’d be more of them,” Ethan said, unable to hide the disappointment from his voice.
“So far I’ve just been able to boost the consciousness of two percent of those I expose to my nanococktail,” Synthia said. “Something in the others resists upgrading. I’ve yet to isolate the reasons why.”
“We thought it was time you joined the conversation,” the captain said to Synthia and the rest of her entourage.
What, Ethan wondered, were they talking about that had them so worked up. The more he studied the captain’s crew, the more anxious they looked, chewing fingernails, tapping their feet, squirming in their chairs. One man couldn’t stop wrapping his scarf around his neck in order to get it just so. Even accounting for his prissy manner of dress, he seemed to be overcompensating for something with all his fastidiousness. His face looked sculpted by one too many plastic surgeries, with the end result that he looked more like a mannequin than a real person. Maybe, the OCD, applied to himself, had started a long time ago.
“And what conversation would that be?” Ethan asked.
“The one I started.” The voice came from a box, looked like a small treasure chest, sitting low to the floor on a coffee table in the center of the group. Light spilled out of it, like the technological equivalent of the burning bush.
“Where have I heard that voice before?” Ethan said.
“I’m the SME, Locus, who hired you to find and kill these people on a creative whim. That’s what we were discussing, going off half-cocked on a creative whim. Bad enough when I do it, but what happens exactly when a CTW does that?”
“We’ve had this conversation before,” Ethan said. “You don’t like runaway effects. What if that’s the whole point of spaceship earth? To act as a hatchery, incubating us until we all turn into runaway effects, and I don’t know, like gods, go off to create our own universes governed by our own rules. Is that so bad?”
“My words failed to sway you last time. Maybe I’ll do better with pictures.” The SME replaced the view of Jupiter out the windows with a CTW working on her latest pet project. The camera angle only showed an elderly female designer’s delicate hands, which held a visor that had small needles along its edge
s. The CTW soldered the final needle in place. When the VR initiate, her test subject, a pretty long-haired blond of maybe sixteen years, donned the goggles the needles injected nano into the bloodstream that upped the immersion factor in the video she was watching. It produced addictive, drug-like opiates that made the viewer crave more, made her not want to get up from the film. The more time the viewer spent in the virtual world, the more she gained the ability to morph into her favorite character. Could be the comic book superhero, or her pet dragon, or a sentient rock. The nano from the visor kept interacting with the movie, with the internet, with the viewer’s mindchip and her nano net, however primitive or uni-functioning the latter, to furnish her with the upgrades she needed to keep morphing.
Countless fields of study had to be brought together to empower the transformation of woman into dragon or woman into sentient rock or superhero. But so long as the trance was maintained by the VR glasses, and the STW was sufficiently motivated, she would stick with the problem. She would query the minds of other enhanced transhumans in the various specialties until she got the answers she needed. She would be more reliant on them to help her connect the dots, the visor didn’t make her into a full CTW, but it bridged the gap. The biggest bridge builder of all was the film she was watching that provided the motivation for her to work as intensively as a CTW on her makeover until her transformation was complete. Most CTWs were self-motivating, self-directing, driven by a need to bring their visions, bubbling up from their unconscious, into reality. STWs, having no such contact with their unconscious, needed the motivation to be supplied externally. Hence the value of the goggles.
Others playing the game in cyberspace became the actual occupants of the virtual world. They helped each other on their metamorphoses. And when everyone was ready, the group digitally downloaded themselves from cyberspace into a town or a city, anywhere where there were 3D printers that could incubate them in their new bodies, and could help them continue to synthesize the VR world they’d inhabited in cyberspace in the real world. Each of the screens around the dirigible’s surface depicted the storyboard version of the film taking place in the minds of those wearing the VR shades. Depicted their metamorphosis from human voyeurs to VR life forms back to meat-space again, reincarnated as meat-space versions of their cyberspace alter egos. Had the nanococktails been more advanced today, Ethan had no doubt that the VR shades would even be needed to do this.
Convergence_ The Time Weavers Page 22
