Retrieving the sword from its velvet lining in the case, he kneeled before that same view of the city where there was just no denying the truth. In that sprawling metropolis alone there would have been over a hundred thousand CTWs coming to tear down the house that Verge built. Eyes wide open and locked on the view—he wanted there to be no doubt in his mind about the true nature of his crime—he drove the sword into his exposed polymer-steel spine, into the one vertebra that housed his next generation quantum chip. It had been housed there instead of his skull just in case two enterprising upstarts like Johnson and Axelman got the same idea to do to him what he did to them.
And he twisted the blade.
For a brief second, his nervous system told him he was on fire. It felt that way, so he had no reason to question it. Except, of course, for the truth.
As the chip shattered it sent out a distress message to Lazarus, their CEO. As to what that message was exactly, Locus couldn’t say. By then all he knew was the blackness, the electrically charged emptiness, the nothing of the void itself. The Buddhists said it was the gateway to the Godhead. That which was beyond description and beyond limits; they referred to it merely as the divine ground. Let’s hope they were right.
FORTY
Lazarus was enjoying the crystal clear waters of Menorca, Spain from his boat, the sea so transparent the ships looked to be flying through the air, not sailing through the water. When Locus’s suicide came up on the smart widow of his boat, just to the right of the wheel he was using to steer by.
With a sigh, Lazarus pressed a button on the dashboard.
The first thing that happened was the ship closed over him. Like the convertible roof of a car pulling up.
The second thing that happened was the ship’s exterior cloaked itself. He was now invisible to prying eyes, overpassing satellites.
The third thing that happened was he was now walking through the portal into Verge’s penthouse suite, using a slightly more perfected wormhole technology than the ones those dunderheads Johnson and Axelman engaged when in orbit around the moon. The technology created, if not exactly perfected, by his ninety-ninth floor CTWs. In truth, they had cannibalized it from one of the free agent CTWs not in Verge’s employ—it seemed like the jokers in the deck were the only ones capable of real magic anymore. Thank Techa they kept a close eye on them.
Lazarus took one look at Locus on his knees on the floor, the sword driven right through his center, and shook his head. “Well, what was I thinking, that someone with morals and ethics could head up a corporation?”
He threw his boat keys on the desk, his eyes still riveted on Locus and his act of hara-kiri. “This right here is exactly why I’m not an advocate of cultural exchange.”
Admiring the same view that had stilled Locus’s mind, he sauntered over to the floor-to-ceiling window frames. Rested his fists on his waist. Looked out over the city. “Well, I suppose you want a job done right, you gotta do it yourself.”
FORTY-ONE
Corbin surveyed his farm from his creaky wooden patio. The house was decrepit, so ripe with decay that no amount of refurbishing would keep it from falling down, but the land, the land was blossoming. He’d taken a swath of the Saharan desert and made it fertile. Not too many people could say that. Using techniques he’d learned from the Israelis who were terraforming their desert with something known as permaculture. A fancy word for learning what plants would grow in the soil and what wouldn’t. Understanding that you had to combine them in a way that they helped one another to conquer the land. Shade trees, therefore, provided shade for the shrubs that needed it to thrive. They in turn provided top-down protection for smaller plant life that gave back to the ecosystem as a whole by being the ones first able to break through the useless sand and clay. If they couldn’t manage that, nothing could survive out here. Best part of all, once established, the system took care of itself with virtually no intervention from him. All he had to do was harvest the yield. And the yield would net him a small fortune.
The patch of shade encroaching on the crops caused Corbin to blanket his eyes with his hand and look up to see what was going on. That was no benign white cloud leaning over the land. It was every bit as dark as the shadow it cast. Too dark, even for a storm cloud. Corbin swallowed hard, denial finally pushing past all the hopefulness. That was no storm cloud. Those were locusts!
He ran to the storage shed, slid the door back just wide enough to get him and his lifesaver out. It was buried in a heap of bric-a-brac, meant to look destined for the recycling center down the road. A used cement mixer perhaps is what someone would have thought at first glance. The camouflage was deliberate. He wheeled the sphere, supported by its thin posts on rollers, out of the barn and into the open. At first, the only thing he could feel over and above his excited heart pounding in his head, like a bat-shit crazy drummer, were the groaning protests of his muscles fighting it out with the creaky wheels undergirding his device. Slowly, his labored breathing, forcing more of the desert’s hot air into his lungs, caused his lungs to feel like seared steaks. The blood leaking out of them trailed out his nose. There wasn’t time to get his contraption a safe distance from the house, but if it worked as designed, he might still be okay.
There was just the matter of targeting the flat face of the sphere, like a basketball that had permanently partially deflated with a good kick. His eyes sought out the cloud of locusts. They found the sun first, searing his eyes, as if he were playing a game of marbles, the small marbles of his eyes trying to knock the big yellow marble out of the circle. The ensuing sunspots, big black blotches of nothing where the sky once was giving mocking camouflage to the one big dark spot he was actually looking for.
If he didn’t fire the device at it now it would be too late; the cloud was descending fast. Corbin keyed the activation sequence, cursing the fact that he’d made it so long so as to be hack-proof. All he needed to do was press one wrong digit and he’d have to start all over again. Shit! He wasn’t seven digits in before he miskeyed and had to start over. Maybe if he hadn’t exhausted his muscles pushing his invention out here they might be capable of finer control when he needed it most.
By the time he got his gizmo fired up, he’d lost half the farm to the locusts. But it was working, it was sucking the cloud toward it. Just when the first of the insects reached the cavernous mouth of the sphere, they pulled back. The entire cloud seemed to be fighting the magnetic draw of the device, dancing and swirling around its eddies and currents.
Corbin ducked the 747 coming straight at him, sucked in by the contraption and, only in the last few seconds, squeezed down to the size of a straw.
The sky went clear in the direction of the beam only briefly before a skyscraper followed the trajectory of the 747. Shit! He ducked again; he couldn’t help it. He’d forgotten that he was in a valley and just aiming the thing at the sky was no guarantee of avoiding structures on the ground, far less whatever happened to be flying overhead.
The skyscraper he was certain was going to crush him compacted down to the size of a dog’s turd before flying into the mouth of the “cement mixer.”
Not too long afterward, a mountain, ripped right off its base, came flying at him. The compacter ripped some of the wildlife off the mountain before the mountain itself got gobbled up by it.
With all that, the cloud of locusts continued to whirl in and out of the gravity beam. It looked almost sentient to Corbin, as if it was figuring out its next move.
The flowing fractal geometries the black cloud kept shifting through struck Corbin as eerily reminiscent of brainwaves he’d witnessed once through an EMF scanner meant to read thoughts.
Finally the cloud came to a decision.
It charged his device.
And it devoured it as it had devoured the rest of his field.
Corbin gasped and jumped back.
The cloud swirled around him as if deciding what to do next. Devour him? Ignore him as just not worth its while?
Fi
nally it condensed and coalesced into the shape of a man. “Hello, Corbin. I’m Lazarus.”
“A nano man! How cool is that?” Corbin swallowed hard. “You’re an AGI?”
“AGI?”
“Advanced General Intelligence.”
“Techa no. Can you imagine what one of those unleashed on the world would do? The CTWs, the next closest thing, are bad enough. No, I’m an ASI. Advanced Single-Minded Intelligence. I have but one purpose. I’m betting you can figure out what that is.”
“But why? Why me?”
“You invented a black hole machine just so you could vacuum locusts out of the sky, Corbin.”
Corbin lowered his eyes guiltily.
Lazarus put his hand on his shoulder supportively. “If it makes you feel any better, we invented one to wipe out entire cities. And we couldn’t focus the thing unidirectionally as you did, which makes our device fairly primitive by comparison. That’s why I hesitated pulling it apart. I needed to establish a link with Verge to ensure the de-construction of the device provided the necessary intel that would make for easy re-engineering. Not my area of expertise, so the ASI patent-machine at Verge had to walk me through it.”
Lazarus laughed. “Can’t believe you risked what you did just to deal with some pesky locusts. If that device had kept running it would have cored out the moon if not pulled it whole into its maw.”
Corbin stared up at the sky and noticed the moon had been in the path of his device. He couldn’t believe he was so focused on the locust cloud he hadn’t noticed. He lowered his eyes in shame.
Lazarus snorted, took a stick of gum out of his pants pocket and chewed on it. He offered Corbin a stick, but Corbin, now in shock, found his body even less responsive than before. “How is it you don’t work for us?” Lazarus said. “Honestly, I can’t imagine them even bothering to ask for your résumé after today.”
Corbin roared in rage and marched toward the shed. He emerged moments later with one of his other devices. A double barreled shotgun loaded with shells packed with the most caustic acid anyone had ever designed. He fired the shells into Lazarus, who healed the gaping holes in himself.
“I got you now, serious distrust of authority figures, huh?” Lazarus said. “I feel you. Techa knows I’ve been disappointed by my share.”
With a sigh, Lazarus elaborated his position; he figured the guy deserved as much. “It’s like this, Corbin. CTWs, their minds warp time and space with their creativity, which is so extreme, it’s analogous to your black hole machine. No one accounted for that in the formulas.” He snorted. “Hell, we were one of the few corporations who embraced Ray Kurzweil’s blind optimism. Saying the pace of technological innovation would continue to accelerate in a geometric fashion. He saw that the future would come at us faster and faster.
“But even his geometric progression is predictable. Steps come in a certain order, just that the distance between steps gets shorter and shorter. But you guys, hell you can pull something out of your ass that shouldn’t exist for a hundred years from now, maybe even three hundred years. Suddenly it’s pointless even to talk about a geometric rate of progress. With you guys walking around, it’s as if time doesn’t exist at all. Instead we live in this eternal now, where anything is possible.
“You and a handful of enlightened sages suggest that that is reality. That the timeline itself is just an illusion. That it collapses in a world without fear. Fear, you see, over what we can’t deal with in the here and now. But if you don’t fear anything… You can manifest what you bloody well want. That’s you CTWs, all right, fearless.”
Lazarus sighed at the man who hadn’t slowed with reloading his shotgun and pumping shells into him the whole time he was talking. Some of his long blond hair was tied back with an elastic band, some of it flowed freely over his shoulders. His beard was geometrically cut, like the bow of a ship. He was quite the anachronistic sight for the Sahara. But somehow the mountain man look, the wild eyes, his unexplained actions… it was all coming together. “It’s like you’re not taking any of this in, Corbin.”
Lazarus shifted his attention away from Corbin towards his thought projection. He broke off some of his nanites to visualize for him the location of the other two-percenters spread across the globe. Lazarus sighed and shook his head. “Techa, this whole genocidal thing promises to be exhausting. This right here is precisely why you have minions.” Getting annoyed by the ringing in his ears of the ongoing shotgun blasts coming from Corbin who couldn’t take a hint, he broke off some more nano and devoured him. The nano broke off from his body in the shape of a black leopard leaping for Corbin. Lazarus figured if the guy wanted to pretend he was big game hunting, he’d humor him.
With a glance back at his thought projection, Lazarus said, “It’s pretty clear what you have to do. You have to figure out how to be in many places at once.”
He dissolved the CTW tracking device back into himself and stared across the landscape. “Honestly, Corbin, for a CTW, I expected more. Making the desert bloom? It’s so 2010s it qualifies as retro.”
Lazarus switched into nano cloud mode. This time he broke himself apart into numerous clouds, swelling his number of nanites in each one so he literally could be in many places at once. The separate nano hives would be able to charge up on the electrical lines in the distance, their nano able to suck up juice directly courtesy of genes borrowed from direct-current-loving bacteria.
The ability to be in many places at once was a miracle only saints and sages had reputedly pulled off before him. Well, for what it was worth, he was on a similar holy mission, of sorts.
FORTY-TWO
“He’ll be coming soon,” Synthia said, “the Nano Man.” She crossed her arms and rubbed her shoulders from the sudden chill. Ethan doubted it was coming from Jarod’s dank basement.
“Who?” Monica asked.
“The head of Verge. He’s the one the SME worked for.”
“How much time do we have to get ready?” Ethan asked.
“There is no getting ready for this guy. There’s no stopping him,” Synthia said. She looked at Noah as if she was sorrier for him than for herself.
“But you’re the most advanced creature on the planet!” Ethan protested.
“She’ not a creature!” Noah protested back at him.
“But I’m not a war machine,” Synthia said to Ethan. “I was built to advance life, not destroy it. You can’t make a socket wrench do what a hammer was designed to.”
Ethan paced and groaned and pulled at his hair. “I will not be made to feel impotent surrounded by the most self-empowered people I’ve ever met!”
“We should spend our last remaining time filled with thoughts of love, not hate. Otherwise he’s already won. I for one plan to treasure my last moments on this Earth with Noah.” She took his hand and led him up the basement stairs and into the garden.
Ethan was so angry he wanted to break things, but it would just have meant more wasted time and energy. If Synthia was right, there wasn’t a moment to waste. His love of a lifetime with Monica would just have to play out at time lapse speeds, like one of those flowers unfolding on camera in “real time.” In the final analysis, an amoeba had a longer shelf life than the time he’d have to be happy with her. He wasn’t going to make his final, bittersweet moments more bitter than they were sweet. Half-tempted to follow the youths up into the garden, he decided instead to take Monica into Captain Nemo’s private cabin.
Jared, a.k.a. Captain Nemo, for his part, had long escaped into his private world. He was refurbishing his basement labs, inspired by the take on the Nautilus he’d experienced in cyberspace. His robot minions were helping him turn the cement crypt into a warmer environment of wood and iron surfaces with hidden storage compartments aplenty. The noise of woodworking in the background had been no small irritant to the speakers who had reason enough to be heated with news of the Nano Man’s pending arrival without the distraction. But the rotary saws and sanders going full tilt in the background see
med like a trifling affair now that the group had disbanded, fading into softer, warmer, fuzzier hues of their former selves.
***
Clasping both of Synthia’s hands in his, and standing opposite her so close, it was like standing flat up against a mirror, Noah kissed her. It was as if he’d gone hunting for his own reflection in the mirror but found only her looking back at him because he was no longer to be found anywhere except inside her. When he came up for air, he said, “You gonna send me flying around the yard again?”
She smiled. “I was built to push limits. I’m just not sure that’s how I want to spend my final moments.”
“I know what you mean.” Noah thought of the days spent getting lost in fine-tuning his LEGO robot. He liked getting lost up in his head, forgetting any sense of himself in his work. This was the first time he’d found a way out of his body not through his head but through his heart. His mind, accordingly, was annoyingly still. He walked with her through the garden wondering where the conversation would come from without his mind racing to the next clever thing to say.
“You know, I’m the one who was born yesterday. You should tell me more about yourself.”
He didn’t want to play this game. Remembering his past, remembering himself as he was, however long ago, just took him away from her, and this moment. The exercise seemed doubly futile in that he was sure she could just read his mind from this close up. Her nano-infused brain could translate the EMF signals given off by his brain better than anything he could transmit from his lips to her. But maybe she just needed to hear his voice. Some people process life more through their ears than their eyes, or any of their other senses. Maybe she just needed to feel his pain so she knew it was okay to be hurting too. Maybe she was hoping to dissolve his pain in her love in her final moments. Maybe he could do the same for her if only he could get out his story quickly enough. So he stopped dithering.
Convergence_ The Time Weavers Page 24
