“You’re doing fine,” Corona said, smiling at him.
“Let’s say I wanted to beat the smart-tube at its own game, how would I do it?” Nova asked.
“Not sure it’s possible. They used to say to oppose a thing is to become it. Now they say to study a thing is to become it. You’d have to out-compete an AI that’s much smarter than you are, only in a specialty area that is its sole focus. Even if you tried to bring in novel insights from fields not related to tube dynamics… Say you thought tubular lifeforms that flex and pass fluids and gases to better cope with crushing underwater pressures had something to teach it, chances are the smart-tubing running through the undersea compound is already studying that option itself and has already determined how best to apply that adaptation.
“I’m not saying it’s not possible for you to make a positive contribution, but it’s like I tell my students, you’re looking for holes in the web. Gaps where convergence hasn’t happened yet where you could make a contribution by encouraging a synthesis of various fields in order to solve the problem aching for solution in order to fill that hole in the net, so that over time the net gets more and more finely woven.”
“But…”
“Nova, give it a rest already,” Corona said cutting him off. “I’m afraid Nova’s niche is finding where the entire game of life has gone wrong and crashing the game entirely.”
“Ah, he wants to launch his own genesis effect. Well, I suppose we all want to be that guy. The Crispy Critters believe the answer will come in the form of a god-gene. Wouldn’t be surprised if half of them go to bed at night hoping to synthesize it while they’re sleeping. I prefer a higher success rate for my endeavors, so I stay away from the moon shots.”
“I was thinking I’d like to see more of the sea creatures down here that glow in the dark,” Nova said, “and now there are more of them.”
“Yes, this section of tubing is responding to the EMF waves your mind is giving off as you pass through it. It’s a localized effect. The tubing is sensitive enough even to read an unupgraded mind.”
“In that case I suppose you and all creation can be forgiven tampering with the natural world today, as I’m rather enjoying the light show.”
“Why isn’t the tube responding to our minds if we’re even easier to read?” Corona asked Lockner.
“I really wasn’t paying attention to my thoughts, but presumably neither of us was thinking much about what we expected to see out the viewport. That or our minds had gone blank whenever we looked outside, a natural response.”
“I guess that makes sense,” she said, though there was a voice at back of her head nagging at her.
“You said you can’t leave us alone,” Nova said. “Does that mean you sleep with us too? Because I’m already having trouble adjusting to our current ménage-a-trois.”
Corona shook her head slowly at Nova’s remark, a weary smile on her face, feeling embarrassed for both of them.
“It’s not a bad idea. She’s already attracted to me, and I can dial up my pheromones until you are too,” he said, eying Nova. “Like this. How do you feel about the idea now?”
Nova gulped. “Okay.”
“Good, it’s settled then. Since we’re entering a highly trafficked area, I will leave you for a bit, because you’ll be safe with the others. I’ll find you again come time for some alone time.” He bowed to them and left.
“I’m surprised you went for his joining us all night long for tantric sex as readily as you did?” Corona said.
Nova made a sour face. “In the natural world it’s normal for blades of grass to bend in the breeze to keep from breaking. Flexibility is an advantage. So for a second there, I thought it was the more natural response.”
“You mean you thought his nature was more human than your own, as opposed to more transhuman.”
“I’m ashamed to admit I sometimes get the two confused. Must be overexposure to all you transhumans. Like forgetting which of us is the bleeding heart liberal.”
“The transhuman condition is not defined by one’s willingness to use tech to get over oneself, Nova. It’s defined by one’s willingness to put oneself in the service of the greater good by way of that tech. Being a social liberal who is all about the greater good, I’m surprised you’re not more confused than you are over what you are.”
“I don’t care how logical that sounds, it still sounds manipulative.”
She smiled without looking back at him, too caught up in the sights of the busy commons area. It was like one of those international food bazaars. Only featuring seafood of such variety that it boggled the mind, none of it ever appearing on a plate topside. To the left were the endless sea-veggie options. To the right were the exotic sea creatures grown from culture so no actual harvesting of sea life was necessary, for the ardent meat lovers. The smells were driving her out of her mind. Her neural net allowed her to parse them far better than Nova could. She took him by the arm, playing bloodhound for him, tracing down the smells and foods she knew he would enjoy more than the others. He was about to complain about her taking his hand but thought better of it the further into the crowd they went.
***
The sex that night was better than expected, Nova had to admit. He found out that he was more of a bottom with other guys, if you could manage to dial his interest up enough. He’d had Corona exploring the inside of his ass with a dildo before and liked it. Lockner’s dick-wielding style was decidedly refreshing compared to his own. He was fierce in one wave, like being attacked by a wild animal. And he was temperate in waves, slow, more like gently undulating tide against the shore. Nova was eager to try Lockner’s style on Corona when Lockner wasn’t around. Lockner’s skin had a satiny smoothness to it that was making Nova’s dick unbelievably hard. He was tripping on the combination of that nearly friction-free smooth, soft skin over the hard muscles, enjoying them constricting and contorting around him. Nova felt he was hugging tight a sack of boa constrictors until the sack busted and they were constricting him as much as one another. He was so high on Lockner’s pheromones that he’d long since dissolved out of himself; any sense of sexuality and sexual preferences went out the door with his sense of self. Only amplifying the effects of Lockner’s pheromones.
When Lockner was drilling Corona, Nova was drilling Lockner. Lockner’s own moaning merely increased, suggesting he was enjoying it as opposed to putting up with it. Perhaps his amplified pheromones made him just as intoxicated with men as it made Nova. In at least one exchange, Nova drilled Lockner’s ass with Lockner face down on the bed as Lockner ate out Corona’s vulva.
With their minds so blown, with one another so melted out of themselves, there were times when Nova thought he was Corona, and times when he thought he was Lockner. It was as if in the middle of the out-of-body experience he crash landed back into the wrong body, like an astral traveler coming back from the heavens and taking a wrong turn somewhere. He wondered if they were experiencing the same sensation.
FOURTEEN
Corona and Nova woke up to Gecko yanking the sheets off of the three of them. “Let Lockner sleep. You two get up and get dressed.”
Nova was still too sleepy to judge Gecko’s reaction to the three of them in bed. But the sense of urgency in his voice had him and Corona hopping to.
“What is it?” Corona asked.
“The attacks on you are not tied to budgetary concerns. They’re triggered by an algorithm. We have about seven minutes to the next one. Just enough time to get to my ship, if we haul ass.”
“And then what?” Nova asked.
“One thing at a time.”
Corona and Nova finished dressing, pulling on the one-piece bodysuits that the station had supplied. Sentient lifesuits that were probably smarter than Nova was, at least at keeping him alive in harsh weather environments.
They ran as fast as they could toward the docking bay where Gecko had secured his ship. No one paid them the least mind. Perhaps there were jogging clubs down h
ere. Perhaps they had their own Olympics. Perhaps they were used to critical-sensitive missions demanding sprinting as fast as the team members could to get to their destinations. Without Corona’s neural net, Nova couldn’t say.
“I don’t know why we’re racing to get out of here. If you ask me, there’s security in numbers,” Nova said, strapping into his seat inside Gecko’s sub. He wasn’t sure why you had to strap into a submarine seat, but it would seem anticlimactic not to do so at this point. “Not to mention the sentient undersea compound has been contemplating end of world scenarios a lot longer than we have. We owe it to the thing to help it live up to its potential.”
“And needlessly threaten all those people’s lives? Your boyfriend is the one that lives for the greater good, right? Or is this another one?”
Nova made a mock “ha-ha” expression at Gecko, not appreciating the dig.
The sub took off like a bullet. Nova was suddenly quite pleased at himself for strapping in. “How can this thing move through water as readily as a rocket through the air?”
“Near frictionless surface? Die-for aqua-dynamics? Nuclear fusion propulsion? All three? Honestly, you’d have to ask the ship.”
Nova made a sour face. “I can live with the mystery.”
“On the contrary. I think you should learn as much about the world as you can before you die.” Gecko was only directing a small piece of his mind at Nova. Most of his attention was on getting them into space, now that they’d breached the ocean’s surface and were still heading straight up.
The constant acceleration had put Nova’s lungs in a vice, increasingly squeezed between the back of the seat and his own chest muscles, which offered little resistance to the increasing G-force.
“Just in case we’re space bound,” Nova said, his voice wavering, “which is starting to look increasingly likely, I feel I should point out that we have nine—count them, nine—levels of ubermind protection on the planet, and absolutely zero in space. Just saying. As survival strategies go, this one sucks. Of course, I’m the primitive, so what do I know?”
“He does have a point, Gecko,” Corona said in a level tone.
“You two and your false securities. That’s why he hasn’t bothered to upgrade, between his Russian doll womb that extends in nine dimensions, so he never has to experience birthing into reality, and your enabling…”
Corona sighed. “He has a point, Nova.”
“Forgive me for outsourcing the problems of the world to the people who love dealing with them so I could get on with enjoying life. And while you two are busy condescending to me, has it occurred to you that you’re the less-evolved lifeforms? You don’t see me pursuing self-transcendence with such singular purpose that I’m little more than an ant in an ant farm, doing what all the other ants are genetically predisposed to do.”
“He has a point, Gecko,” Corona said, folding her arms, and sounding stern.
Gecko looked like he was going to respond, but breaching the Earth’s outer atmosphere and entering the darkness of space beyond absorbed him as it did the rest of them.
“Um, what’s that bright spot on the moon?” Nova asked.
Gecko took a second to assess things. “That would be the laser cannon turning towards us.”
“Let me guess, it’s not meant to function like a lighthouse beacon to keep us from crashing its shores,” Nova said.
“It’s meant to blow us out of the sky,” Gecko said, flipping switches. “They’re not supposed to have one on this side of the moon. Only the far side, as part of planetary defense.”
“And if the aliens get past the moon?” Nova said. “Seems logical that they’d want one to aim at them before they breeched Earth’s atmosphere. Maybe if you just explained we’re the good guys.”
“I don’t think the party or parties that hacked it is any more interesting in our longevity than they were the last few times they tried to kill you,” Gecko said, flipping more buttons.
“Why do you keep flipping buttons?!” Nova yelled. “Has it got something to do with feeling impotent and powerless in the face of a laser cannon? Because if so, I would like some buttons to press, please.”
“I’m calibrating the refractive index of the ship’s surface so it dissipates rather than concentrates the laser,” Gecko said, sounding impatient. “Done!”
“Don’t bother celebrating,” Nova said.
“Why?” Gecko asked, his eyes glued to the laser cannon firing at them, as if he weren’t a hundred percent sure of his workaround until it hit. When it did, he actually relaxed somewhat. The muscles in his neck unclenched despite applying force to the wheel to take them out of the path of the laser that could still blind them.
“Because they’re shooting at us from other directions. And those other parties are not firing lasers. Those look like missiles to me.” Nova had sent three reminders from his brain to his lungs to breathe in as many seconds, all to no avail.
Gecko checked his dashboard cameras. There were attack ships closing on them from behind, from where they were parked in Earth orbit. Others were launching from various space stations. And some were even blasting off from the moon. “Shit! How could I get such tunnel vision?”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Nova said. “A laser cannon aiming up your ass would cause anyone to feel a bit preoccupied.”
“This ship has no offensive weapons,” Gecko said.
“Well, we don’t want to make it too easy on ourselves, do we?” Nova carped. He felt his sphincter spasm, tried to be subtle about looking down and sniffing himself to make sure he hadn’t soiled his pants. He also felt on the verge of several scientific discoveries, like fear makes the heart a less effective pump, which in turn makes the leather seats harder. He thought he might be getting bed sores sitting up in a seat he’d occupied less than an hour.
“Just keep us out of the line of fire long enough for me to hack the ships’ neural nets,” Corona said.
“They’ll have anti-hacking sentient AI aplenty,” Gecko informed her, “all tasked with unconventional attack modalities, the kinds that aliens might launch against them.”
At the announcement, muscles in Nova’s back he didn’t know he had did things they’d never done before. It was as if they couldn’t count on his brain to keep them safe anymore so they were doing their own thing.
“Like Nova said, we wouldn’t want this to be too easy.”
Gecko smiled at her smart-ass remark and took to piloting the space plane around the missiles. As they whizzed by, the rockets merely circled back around until they reacquired a lock on their target.
“While she’s hacking their ships, can you hack the satellites in orbit?” Nova asked Gecko. “See which ones can be retasked to come to our defense. Either throw themselves in the path of fire, or reveal some other weaponry that technically no one is supposed to have up here.”
Gecko nodded. “Yeah, my neural net can handle the multitasking. Good thinking for a moron.”
“Yeah, well, some of us like upgrading our minds playing video game re-runs of Space Invaders.” Despite the glib brush off, Gecko’s comment hit him like a punch to the gut.
“In that case…” Gecko rerouted his communications to the satellites in the area to the video monitors behind his seat and Corona’s.
Nova pivoted the monitors to him and used the fold-down trays in keyboard mode by flipping the trays over. He was used to playing two-monitor games. Though, usually with joy sticks in each hand. “This’ll go faster if you do it,” Nova said, thinking the last time he felt like this he was at a high school track meet, he’d dug his cleats into the starting block and was looking up at the guy with the gun, with an explosion of anxiety drumming his ears, just daring the gun to be louder.
“But you’re likely to have a different fighting style, which might help throw them off. Three gamers are harder to get a handle on than two.”
Nova nodded at Gecko’s logic and concentrated at sending the first salvo of missiles at the sh
ips doing the firing. There weren’t enough missiles in his arsenal to go one on one with the other projectiles. At least this way, the others would have to redirect themselves away from Gecko’s ship to protect their own ships, assuming their AI was up to snuff. No reason it wouldn’t be.
His strategy was working. But half as many missiles coming towards them were still too many. It was less of an intellectual realization and more of a knot in his stomach, an invisible hand plucking one muscle fiber in his neck after another until the guitar strings just snapped. It was the sweat running up his chest in the zero gravity and breaking away from his forehead to collide against Corona’s and Gecko’s faces and the backs of their necks that allowed them to register his tension without even looking back at him. “I suppose it’s pointless to ask why Earth has a space fleet at the ready for an alien invasion,” Nova said. “Chalk it up to Boy Scout preparedness?”
“All I know is space defense predates mindnet. It predates the Convergence Era. It predates Singularity. So either some paranoid was just ahead of his time with his particular brand of paranoia,” Gecko said, “or…”
“He knows something the rest of us don’t,” Nova finished his thought for him. “Woo hoo! Got one,” Nova shouted as one of his missiles collided with one of the enemy’s. When his enjoyment wasn’t shared he deflated. Then again, finding the one needle in the haystack of missiles coming towards them probably wasn’t such a big deal, he thought.
“I’m in,” Corona said.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Gecko replied.
“Hacking supersentient limited AIs is more art than science. That’s because they rely more on science; that’s usually their weak point,” Corona explained. The missiles were all veering away from them now and back towards the ships that sent them.
“You can’t blow them out of the air, I mean non-air!” Nova screeched. “That’s our space defense system.”
“He’s got a point,” Corona said.
“Can you reprogram the rockets to return to the ships’ docking bays so they can be recycled?” Gecko said.
The God Gene Page 13
