Mercedes saw the ants crawling up her legs and tossed the scanner to Nova. “They’re not interested in you for some reason.”
Nova hesitated to mention that Corona had placed certain protections around him. Especially since he had no idea how they worked or how he could recruit them into helping Mercedes. “Stay calm,” he said.
He sent out a distress call over the scanner. “I need access to any and all group minds with free mind power now! I’m a forest manager and my partner is being carried off by army ants. She’s not the only one. They appear to be devouring every living thing in this sector of the forest.” He stopped talking long enough for someone to answer.
Seconds that felt like minutes later the mike crackled. He panicked thinking all he was going to get back was static hiss. But then… “This is Level 1. Sector 33. We’re on it,” came the male voice on the other end. Nova knew what that meant. The group minds were nested at levels. Most were at level one. You exhausted the mind power at that level without getting an answer to your question, you got bumped to level two, with quantum measures more mind power, assuming they found the problem interesting enough or with far-reaching enough implications. If they couldn’t handle the problem without recruiting more mind power you got bumped up to level 3. Now you were rocking three levels of mind power in the global mind. There were nine levels altogether. By level nine the entire planetary interlinked consciousness and all of mindnet was involved. The fact that Nova had gotten the Sector 33 designation meant he’d just gotten one of the group minds at level one. It would be them that would decide if his problem warranted more mind power.
***
Derrick had already repurposed one of the numberless G.O.L.E.M. micro-satellites in the sector Nova was in. “What the hell?” he said looking at the images popping up.
Teresa leaned over his shoulder. Her scent a mix of new car leather and jasmine. The leather odor coming from her action-figure bodysuit, which pretty much pegged her as a field agent wannabe. The jasmine was no doubt coming from her nano-infested underarms responding to her thoughts regarding her favorite fragrance of the moment. “Yeah, that forest has definitely been hacked.”
“Could just be the ant hive mind that’s been hacked.”
“No way the forest’s supersentience would stand for that,” Teresa said, nibbling on a doughnut. His mouth watered with the taste of the lemon merengue-filled chocolate doughnut she was eating, his body nano manufacturing the same tastes and textures against his tongue for him in sympathy with her, so he wouldn’t have to ask her to share her doughnut and blow his whole health-nut cover.
“The ants are ignoring Nova,” Derrick said, pulling down everything he had on him from the mindnet and loading it onto his quantum mindchip.
“Could be they’re just interested in female lifeforms,” Teresa suggested. “If you want to do the most damage to a given population, go after the reproducing females.”
“At the rate that ant population is growing? They hardly need to worry about the females dropping their payload. Besides, why mess with your food source?”
“Could we dial down the screaming from the chick being devoured by ants already?” Theresa said, clamping her palms against her ears. “I’m trying to think.”
Derrick dialed down the volume on the monitor. “What’s the AI say about all this?”
Teresa panned her head to take in the server farm forming the walls around them, and the mazelike configuration of walls beyond those on this and the upper levels. They were inside their own library of congress of sorts, only the only “books” Level 1, Sector 33 stored were computer chips held together in vast arrays. “From the way she’s lighting up, I’d say she’s rather intrigued with the problem.”
They both returned their eyes to the monitor. “Looks like she’s hacked her way into the army ant hive mind.”
“A hell of a lot of good that’ll do us if the problem is happening at the ecosystem level,” Derrick balked.
“Switch to 3D holo.”
Derrick brought up holovision mode and they put on their visors. “She got in via the microbes on the ants and their victims. Nice.”
“We have CRISPRs that are functional at that level?”
“Yeah, of course. They’re hive-mind arrayed to give them whatever mind power they need to address the problem. They just have to be activated by the supersentience overseeing the forest. Being as it has been hacked, SALLY stepped in.” SALLY was the name of the Level 1, Sector 33 AI.
“Techa, can you imagine an age where lifeforms weren’t self-hacking? With or without an external stimulus? Must have been hell,” Teresa bemoaned.
“She’s really wrestling to regain control of the CRISPR units those ants are using for minds. Whatever’s got control of the CRISPRs seems to be counterhacking her as rapidly as she gets in.”
Teresa and Derrick took their eyes off the 3D holo and stared at one another, and then they pulled the visors off. “Shit!” they both said at the same time.
Derrick got on the comm. “One of our Level 1 AIs has been hacked. It’s being used to sabotage the Magic Forest project in quadrant 32 dash A dash 17.” He waited for someone from Level 2 to respond. He was swallowing spit repeatedly and his right leg was bouncing a mile a minute. However long he’d been waiting for a response, it was long enough to notice his newly formed coping mechanism.
He stared at the digital clock. “Level 1, we’ve addressed the issue,” came the female voice at the other end speaking for Level 2, Sector 117, according to Derrick’s monitor. “You’re good to go. You were right about the Level 1 hack, by the way. It was sector 5137 causing the problems.”
Derrick’s clock said thirteen seconds had elapsed since he’d placed the call. Teresa and Derrick looked at one another. “Shiiiiiiit,” they said at the same time. “Must be nice to be a Level 2,” Theresa said.
“What kind of ungodly power they’re working with to solve a problem that is intractable at our level in thirteen seconds?”
“Actually, three seconds. It took the other ten to exhaust the rest of Level 1’s computational availability with its idling CPU chips.” Teresa pointed to their dashboard as evidence. “What made you think the hack was of Level 1 and not of the forest’s ubermind?”
Derrick was the senior agent in charge, so he was used to fielding these logistics questions from the junior team members. “Sally has algorithms at her disposal for hacking that would be totally foreign to a forestry ubermind. There’s no way, if the ecosystem’s supersentience were the source of the problem, it could counterhack her that fast. It might put up a good fight, considering the bulk of its algorithms are self-evolving but…”
“Got you,” she said nodding.
Derrick took a deep breath and let it out. He returned his eyes to the monitor. The overgrowth of army ants had died off so fast, the supersentient forest sent a breeze into the area to clear them away. On occasion it could ask and be granted permission to control its own weather based on need. Whatever was going on with the atmospheric nano cloud supersentiences in the vicinity, they didn’t mind procuring the magic to assist a forest in need.
The animals were dropping from the trees, or crawling out of the ground where they’d been kept in suspended animation for whatever purposes. Derrick didn’t feel the need to look into whatever intel had been dredged up on how the ants’ behavior had been altered. He was more interested in the hackers that had done the job than in how they’d pulled off the magic. The Level 1 AI running sector 33 would have already closed the loophole pertaining to deficient coding as would have all the Level 1 AIs to make sure a similar problem didn’t require recruiting Level 2 mind power in the future.
Derrick picked up the comm. “How are things at your end, Nova?”
***
Nova was still dusting the dead ants off of Mercedes. It was like peeling the wrapper off of a sex doll that had arrived in the mail. Replete with perfect muscle tone and 36-24-36 contours. To say nothing of the alabaster skin a
nd long straight blond hair Nova couldn’t stop imagining her whipping him with as she flicked her head at him, like in one of his favorite low-rent, low-grade martial arts holo vids. She was coming around just fine, damn her, interrupting the movie playing out in his head.
Nova picked up the scanner and talked into it. “She’ll be back to normal in under a minute, I’m guessing. Next time don’t be so good at your job. I could stand to take advantage of her in her semi-intoxicated state.”
He heard a chuckle at the other end and a, “Thanks for flying the friendly skies. Enjoy the rest of your day.” Then the mike went dead, conveying the severed connection.
***
“What’s got your dick all twisted in a knot?” Teresa asked, scratching the stubble of his two-day old beard for him when she saw him picking at it. The fact that he could grow a convincing five o’clock shadow even if it took him two days to do it was probably as good a reason for labeling him “senior partner” around here as any. They had matching red curly hair that they absently ran their hands through thinking through thornier problems. Sometimes they’d even catch one another twisting one another’s curls instead of their own and pull away embarrassed. He was guessing his blank stare and unblinking eyes had given him away this time, not the hair curling.
“Whoever hacked into a Level 1 sector wasn’t just some Quantum-chip upgraded dufus,” Derrick said.
“I don’t know. I hear those latest upgrades are pretty potent.”
“Not enough to outmaneuver all of Level 1. No, there’s only one explanation.”
They turned and looked at one another and said in the same instant, “Corporate.”
“Let’s see if we can put a name to them,” Derrick said.
“To say nothing of a motive.”
FIVE
Otto threw some bread crumbs at his ducks. He was getting close to the end of the offerings in the bag. Soon his little relaxation ritual would be at an end. He glanced up from the birds’ feverish attempts to peck the last of the crust slices from the water, over the edge of the infinity pool rimming his penthouse balcony. Staring glazy-eyed at the horizon. The skyscrapers rose before him like shapely, swirling glass sculptures in his own private Zen garden of nothing but brushed stone and glass. Considering he owned the most magnificent towers, and the rest were just growing up like weeds between them, it was just a matter of tending the garden to get nature back in balance.
“I’m afraid there’s been a problem, sir,” his chief of security said, crassly interrupting his quiet vigil with his basso profondo voice, as he stepped through the sliding glass doors onto the patio.
“Yes, I know,” Otto replied.
“He appears to have a protector. What do you propose, sir?”
“That we take a trials of Hercules approach. See what tricks she has up her sleeve that might serve us well against future adversaries through a series of tests.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll see to it.”
“No, that’s okay, Max. I’ll see to it,” Otto said, throwing the last of the crumbs at the ducks and smiling. He’d finally hit the sweet spot of his serenity campaign, feeling as centered as he was ever likely going to feel.
Max, the largest Chinese gentleman Otto had ever seen—he’d have made a great linebacker—bowed to Otto and slipped back through the sliding glass doors which he closed behind him. The sound of the sliding door was indistinguishable from the blade of a guillotine falling on a head. Otto had had it serviced several times until he could get the sound just right.
He held out his hand and the ducks dissolved into small black nano clouds that swarmed like bees briefly before merging with his hand. The bag he was feeding them the crumbs from, it too burst into nano dust and swirled about before reforming with his body.
Otto got up and walked back inside his apartment through the closed sliding glass doors, as if they just weren’t there.
SIX
The sign at the edge of the complex read, DARPA. It was short for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Somewhere buried inside the complex was Building 41. And somewhere buried inside Building 41 was Corona. She was sitting opposite a Mr. Felix Ungerman. It was her job to interview him. He had come with a proposal in search of DARPA funding. He in return was supposed to tantalize her with what he could do to ensure America kept its technological and military edge against other countries, other special ops agencies, hell, against Felix the cat if the cat was deemed too damn smart for its own good.
In the room over was Gecko. He had the same job as Corona. For a while in fact they’d been lovers. She broke it off. He was too into head games. In front of him was a woman who in many respects was no different than Mr. Felix Ungerman. Except her name was Alicia Bounds. And her proposal, though dramatically different than Mr. Ungerman’s, was in many respects, entirely the same. It was Gecko’s and Corona’s jobs to listen to them drone on without their eyes glazing over. It was a government job. Eyes glazed over, even if every idea put to them was as out there as throwing comets at Mars to help move terraforming along. Or decommissioning HAARP in Alaska in favor of a more advanced planetary shield against aliens. Honestly, there was only so many times you could get your mind blown before even the crazy stuff started sounding mundane.
Which was why, for now at least, Gecko and Corona really weren’t listening. They were running their minds on autopilot, letting their neural nets ask the appropriate questions so that Felix Ungerman and Alicia Bounds could feel like they were being taken seriously. Meanwhile, Gecko and Corona powwowed over more serious matters, telepathically. Since they both had cutting edge neural nets, getting into one another’s minds was a relatively simple matter, even through the Faraday cages that the rooms were supposed to be.
“Your boy was in the middle of an ecosystem hack today,” Gecko whispered inside her head. “The Magic Forest, just outside Arlington, Virginia, to be precise. Took Level 2 intervention to shut it down. A bit suspicious wouldn’t you say?”
“Yeah, looks like they saw right through my ruse.”
“So why isn’t he dead yet?”
“You know these guys. They don’t make a move until they know they’ve got you beat every which way from Sunday. Anticipated every possible move and countermove in enough scenario games to make a chess master’s mind ache.”
“So they’re testing your limits.”
Corona sighed. “And now they know he has a protector. A formidable one.”
“And when they find out what you can and can’t do to protect him?”
“They’ll look to see who I’ll recruit. Just how far my network of supporters go. And just what they can and can’t do.”
“Don’t look at me to come to your rescue. He’s the guy who stole you away from me, remember?”
“You didn’t lose me to another man. You lost me because you have a way of confusing love with twenty-four seven domination games. Love for you is mental chess. Only you could find that stimulating enough to want it to continue forever.”
“Sooner or later you’ll realize that keeping each other sharp by forcing one another to think our way out of the traps we set for each other is love. In this world at least. We have to push one another to transcend our limits. Otherwise, who will? You can’t do it yourself. No man or woman is that self-aware of their own blind spots. And what is it you’re so fond of saying? ‘The only safe place is one step ahead of the other guy’s tech’.”
She knew he was right, of course, in so far as it goes. She knew also that he was stirring in just enough rhetoric to the logic mix to confound her, because he was well aware of her tortured past and how security meant everything to her. In truth, he was the perfect foil for her, and so the perfect lover. If an enemy were to come for her and were to get through her defenses, it would be by using one or another ploy that Gecko had already tried. He really was her best defense against a big bad world. But even a cursory reading of Erich Fromm’s The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness would enlighten the virgin mind on the subject
that sadomasochism—for whatever else you cared to call these power games of taking turns holding one another prisoner just to see if the prisoner could escape the escape-proof cell of the mind—it was not love. And love was the only thing that could set her free. She was reminded of Ben Franklin’s words, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
“It’s probably for the best you don’t rush to my defense,” Corona said. “If I try to go it alone they’ll suspect something. But they can’t know the extent of our network defenses, who our friends are and what they’re capable of.”
“It’s an age of transparency, honey. All information is there for the asking, you just have to know who to ask.” The tone of Gecko’s voice had changed. It had gone through quite a range of changes as he talked, like a master safe cracker playing the tumblers to see which come-on got her to open the locked door of her mind.
“Yeah, but each move on the chessboard exposes more of your strategy, your style of play. If you’re not careful, tells your opponent more about you than it does about them. And my friends are rocking the most advanced neural nets out there and 1000 IQs and all the wetware that makes them the non-corporate types they are. They’re free spirits and free agents. They couldn’t tolerate the disinformation wars, the psy-ops, and the structured confines of a corporation and the things they do to keep their people in line. I’m guessing it’s going to be much harder to get a handle on their style of play than it is going to be for us to get a handle on theirs.”
“Maybe so,” Gecko conceded. “But you’re forgetting one thing, sweetheart, for corporations, psy-ops is the air they breathe. It’s not a hobby to them. Nor is it an annoying distraction from the creative work that free spirits are known for. You want to play strategy games to win, you may need to become the monsters you’re facing down. And not just in your downtime like some role play game you can walk away from. It’s going to be twenty-four-seven.”
The God Gene Page 4
