“I can do that.” Corona appeared to be on it by how the missiles were slowing as they got closer to their host vessels.
“What the hell?” Nova said. He could feel something had gotten ahold of them. It was like one of those fighter jets landing on an aircraft carrier by way of a catch cord. “Is that a tractor beam? I always wanted to be caught in a tractor beam. Of course, I was imagining some pretty cool aliens on the other side of one.”
“See that asteroid in orbit it looks like they’re mining?” Gecko said. “They’ve got us in a Bermuda triangle of sorts between their energy beam weapons. The one coming from the asteroid, the one coming from earth, and the one coming from the moon.”
“And how does that work?” Nova asked, his voice off register again. He really was going to have to work on his excitability at his first opportunity.
“My guess is the vortex the triangulation creates is a mini-wormhole,” Gecko explained. It’s part of the earth defense system. Another off-book modification.”
“What are your chances of shutting down the wormhole?” Gecko said to Corona.
“Slim to none in the time we have. Whoever our opponent is, he’s gotten a sense of my hacking style and closed that loophole.”
“So use your neural net to switch up your personality and your playing style,” Gecko said without losing a beat.
She looked at him shocked. “We’re out here to learn to think on our feet,” Gecko said, “not long enough for Earth’s ubermind to kick in, but to stay alive for the duration. You want to look at me with the ‘how many kinds of crazy are you’ eyes go ahead. But you’re just wasting time.”
Corona must have known he was right because she didn’t waste time arguing. She broke eye contact and did as was asked. Nova guessed her compliance when her entire façade changed. She did look like another person, like someone he didn’t want to know.
The ship started to vibrate violently. “I hate to state the obvious,” Nova said calmly at first to Corona before resorting to shouting, “but work faster!”
He grabbed hold of his arm rests harder than ever and pulled back on his seat. Gecko looked back at him with an amused expression. “Oh yeah, forcing your seat into a reclined position is an excellent defense against a black hole.”
“You think that’s something? Just watch me slip into a catatonic state. See how quickly that neutralizes it.”
But it was too late. Even as Nova felt himself retreating into some dark corner of his mind, he knew he wouldn’t get there fast enough. He could sense them going down the black hole’s drainage pipe. The ship was vibrating so violently it had transitioned from pulling Nova’s muscles away from his bones to feeling more like one of those cheap motel beds balancing its annoyingness with a half-decent massage. He couldn’t tell if things were going black because the ship’s telemetry was fried or because the neurons could no longer pass the electrons from his eyes to his brain inside the gravity of a black hole. He felt thick for the same reason. As if he couldn’t quite assemble a thought with blood ceasing to flow through his brain.
And moments later, after everything had gone eerily quiet and still, they were just on the other side, erupting through the black hole with noise and violence. Some of that bedlam was on account of their own screaming, some of it was on account of the ship showing signs of life again.
Nova breathed easier, though he didn’t know why. They were in an alien universe and there was likely no way back home. Absolutely not a situation to relax into. “I don’t suppose anyone brought a map with them to this alternate universe,” he said.
“It’s not another universe,” Corona said, gasping. “It’s game over. Enough, Gecko. It took me longer than usual to recognize one of your mind games, but the gig is up.”
Gecko smiled mirthfully at them. “You handled yourselves well, both of you,” he said.
“We did what!” Nova unstrapped himself and proceeded to wail on Gecko. Gecko barely bothered to defend himself. “You hit like a girl. Knock it off before I plant you in that seat permanently.” Nova just screamed with all he had and pounded away with all he had before Gecko pushed him back into his seat with one hand.
“You want to use your energy more productively, ask me why I put you through this,” Gecko said.
“I’m more interested in how,” Nova said. “I don’t have a neural net you can hack like Corona.”
“Easy enough to manipulate the monitors and the spaceports and the ship’s thrusters, which you drew your sense of reality from,” Gecko explained.
Nova sighed. “Well, for what it’s worth, you’re better than the people who I buy my video games from,” he said with bitterness. He figured somehow that confession made him sound less weak-minded, which was probably just more of him being ridiculous.
“Why did you put us through this, Gecko?” Corona said, sounding impatient.
“Duh,” Nova said. “Because the best way for Neuro-Tech to get at us is not by repeating its same mistake over and over again. It’ll wait next time until all levels of the ubermind are sufficiently preoccupied to not have enough mind power left to come to the rescue.” Gecko and Corona both pivoted their seats towards him with wide-eyed expressions, clearly shocked that the monkey figure it out ahead of the rest of them.
“Fuck me,” Gecko and Corona said in tandem, slowly pivoting their seats forward. “How did the monkey manage that?” they both mumbled in tandem, just infuriating Nova all the more.
“And that’s not the half of it,” Nova said. “There’s no way Neuro-Tech is going through all this because they’re afraid of a factory recall that involves everyone on the planet. They could easily make that work for them by ensuring the software patch skews the populace’s minds just enough to create more or consume more of their products to compensate for the damage to the bottom line. This is not fear of the factory recall of all factory recalls. This is more than that. There’s only one possible answer. One of us has a channel opened to the quantum mind that’s more broadband than anyone else’s. One of us is playing host to the first god-gene that will be activated on Earth.”
Their seats both swiveled towards him in slow motion again, the same wide-eyed expression on both their faces.
“We’re going with you as the obvious choice,” Gecko and Nova said in tandem.
“Will you two stop being so in sync? It’s freaking me out.”
“You’re freaked out?” Corona said.
“You should try the view from our seats,” Gecko said.
“It’s not me, I’ll tell you that right now.” Nova folded his hands defensively.
“No, it has to be you,” Gecko said. “It’s perfect cover. What better place to hide it than in someone no one would ever guess?”
“Gecko is an expert at strategy games and at getting inside people’s heads, Nova. You should listen to him.”
“I know, he figured out all this ahead of the two of us,” Nova said acquiescing. “But did he stop to think that the unlocking mechanism for the god gene, whichever one of us has it, might be all three of us working in concert?”
Gecko’s eyes went wide. “A triune god. How very Christian. I like it. No, little one, I didn’t think of that. Your suggestion is brilliant. What’s more, it feels right.”
“Why? Because it ties you to us even more than before, to our hearts, our minds, and our bedroom?” Nova blurted.
Gecko smiled impishly. “I’m afraid it might very well take the activation of the god gene to wipe away my god complex. So, yeah, don’t expect Machiavelli to switch personalities as readily as Corona.”
“I’m not letting you into my bedroom, I don’t care how many pheromones you secrete,” Nova hissed.
“You should know better than to dare me to hack your mind.”
Corona nodded. “Seriously, Nova, you should know better. He was just joking, Gecko. Don’t get your dick to stand up and solute the holy trinity just yet. I’m not sure I’m any more interested in letting you into our bed either.”
Gecko just smiled. “Necessity is the mother of invention. Maybe of acquiescence too.”
“Screw you,” Corona and Nova said in tandem.
“Thank Techa. I thought it would take forever to slip the psychic slipper onto the other foot,” Nova said.
Gecko’s latest smile looked more rueful. “It’s probably all academic in any case. There’s no way the ubermind is going to permit the activation of the god gene on Earth. Even if it has to drop everything else it’s working on just to shut us down. And they’ll have full corporate support, including Neuro-Tech’s backing. You can expect whoever is behind this at Neuro-Tech, he’s working without the company’s sanctioning. And not even he or she is swimming upstream of all of that. And neither are we.”
The resulting silence sounded their three-way agreement, and their death knell.
FIFTEEN
Gecko landed his Uber-rental spaceship on the tip of a spindle, merging it with the free flowing cityscape whose detachable tops lent variety to the topography.
“It’s like the Jetson cartoons!” Nova exclaimed, regarding this sector of the metropolis.
“Retro-Roboville, as it’s known to some,” Gecko said flatly and somewhat absently, attending to the final docking details, and to locking the ship down. That accomplished, he sighed relief. “No one’s really on mindnet out here, so provided we stay off it, we should be about as off-grid as you can get.”
“But that means we’re even less likely to see what’s coming for us!” Corona eyed Gecko with wild eyes.
Gecko just twitched his eyebrows back at her and said, “Get used to things coming at you when your defenses are down.”
The elevator in the hollow shaft of the spindle felt like an out-of-phase time machine, taking them further into the future and the past at the same time.
Once they were on the ground walking the streets, they could appreciate the full homage to the Jetson’s cartoons. The humans looked like cartoon characters, their muscles incompletely drawn in or not drawn in at all. There were plenty of nanococktails out there that could accomplish that though while still maintaining body strength and resilience. And the airbrushed complexions would have been due to the skin-specific nano. As for the water-colored skies that never changed and displayed no sign of the weather, and the dust-free, blemish-free cityscape as a whole, the atmospheric nano would have been tweaked accordingly. Also the nano-outercoats of the buildings likely resisted dust, rain, whatever else.
Most of the pedestrians were carried along as if on airport conveyor belts, only by their antigravity boots. One of the child-size bots was attempting to right himself after one of his leg thrusters gave out on him. Finally, he killed the thruster on the active unit and walked over to Nova and entourage. He handed Nova the busted leg unit. “Could you fix this for me, please? I can’t fly right.”
Nova struggled with the dumb smile on his face, overwhelmed by the robot’s cuteness and innocence, expecting that any human that passed him by would have a clue how to fix him. And would happily do so. Gecko didn’t wait for Nova to come out of his paralysis. He bent down and started tinkering with the busted unit, using tools that were on the robot himself, stored in his chest cavity.
“Oh yeah, I always wondered what that body part was for,” the robot said, tapping his chest, and leaning in to examine Gecko’s handiwork, as if he was trying to learn how to do this himself for the future. But Nova suspected he didn’t have enough room in his head for that.
“How is it he’s an engineer all of a sudden?” Nova asked Corona.
“Those of us with neural nets can download whatever aptitudes we need as we need them,” she explained.
“But we’re supposed to stay off grid!”
“I’m guessing this is one of the many aptitudes he downloaded previously.”
“And the reason you haven’t done this in my presence before is…?” Nova said, his voice strained.
She leaned into him and whispered, “I don’t like to make you feel small.”
“Whereas he has no problem with that,” Nova replied with a sour face. Taking a beat to sneer at Gecko, he said, “Why did he bring us here?”
“My guess is to help him forge a heart connection with you. The city is nothing but primitives even lower functioning than you are.”
“And that would be important because?”
“If he’s to prepare our minds for more sophisticated attacks going forward, he needs to bond with you better, or why bother? He can’t fake the inspiration necessary to keep you alive. That can only be born of a sense of urgency.”
“I suppose in the larger context of things, I can take his condescending to me.”
The robot jumped up and down with excitement and clapped when he saw his other leg was working again. And he took to the air and did corkscrews with his air thrusters and some upside down moon-walking. He landed and gave Gecko a big hug. “You think you’ll be able to fix yourself next time?” Gecko asked.
“Um, not really. You did that kind of fast.”
Gecko’s unusually tough demeanor seemed to be softening before the small bot’s childhood zeal. “You want me to go over it again for you?”
“No, that’s okay. I can always find a human to fix me.” Child Bot saluted him and raced off like speed racer on his turbo-charged legs, running on a cushion of air.
Gecko teared up at Child Bot’s faith in humanity. Presumably because he didn’t share it. “We should get going,” he said, perhaps because he didn’t want to stand there holding the weight of his emotions any longer without his legs helping him to pump the blood back to his heart, which wasn’t strong enough to bear the pain on its own.
“Who made this place?” Nova asked as they ambled on.
“The Tinkerer,” Gecko explained. “An old-school robot himself. He salvaged everyone from the junkyards, landfills and cemeteries. The robots decommissioned because they were too primitive to be of much use to anyone anymore and not worth rehabbing. The humans he dug up out of their coffins, and he tweaked their psychologies until he gave them reason to live again.”
“He brought the dead back to life?” Nova swallowed hard, the spit in his throat tasting bitter. The metallic flavor of blood. As if his bleeding heart were leaking internally just at the news.
“Not exactly,” Gecko explained. “Their nano was advanced enough to keep their bodies from decaying. They were in suspended animation more than they were dead. But they didn’t want to live any more if living meant upgrading. So Tinkerer brought them here, to Retro-Ville, where they don’t have to. As to their Jetson’s makeover, well, they’re like the Amish now, a backwards looking cult, so I guess they don’t mind. Must give them a sense of community.”
“For what it’s worth,” Nova said, “I’m glad you haven’t lost your humanity in becoming transhuman.”
“Is that what you fear? That you’ll lose yours?” Gecko said, as they strolled the avenues, with the faster moving pedestrians zooming over and around them with their boot thrusters. They continued to multitask taking in the city with talking. Nova was starting to think many of those skyscrapers were holograms, as shifting angles on them did too much to how they were perceived; there one minute and gone the next.
Nova stalled for time with his eye-gazing, pondering Gecko’s question. “I think the most human thing of all is to want to learn new things, get more proficient at what you do know. Just that you transhumanists take it to the exclusion of all else.”
“Fair enough,” Gecko gritted out. Nova wasn’t quite sure why the admission cost him so much, other than he was trying to empathize with Nova’s point of view and it wasn’t easy for him. “Loving something is quite the invitation to turn it into a drug. You get so addicted, there’s nothing left to you after a while but craving the next fix.” He said this staring at Corona. “Nothing more pathetic than an addict.”
“The first lesson in attaining higher consciousness is to learn non-attachment,” Nova said. He could tell Gecko w
as resisting the urge to say something like, “More wisdom from the mouth of a simpleton.” Instead he just took a deep breath and held it.
“Thanks for being willing to consider me human, by the way,” Gecko said, “considering there’s nothing I love more than to entrap people in my twisted prison houses of the mind. I’m more of a psychopath and a serial killer.”
“Just your version of tough love,” Nova said. “You love more intensely than I do. You want everyone to feel that intensity. But to do that you have to set them free from their fears. Conscience compromises cunning, but fear stills the heart. You also have to help people find a way out of their minds and away from the things they think they love; you have to break their attachments. To show them that by loving you they’ll have more joy and excitement than they could have going it on their own.” Both Gecko and Corona were staring at him now, looking guilty, exposed, and vulnerable, and, as always, shocked by the revelations flowing out of the simpleton’s mouth.
“And you, what do you live for?” Gecko asked. The sternness in his voice, the stiffness in his body and his movements, the puffed out chest, the condescension in his tone, the sense of distance, all meant to mask a growing fondness for him, perhaps. Or perhaps he just needed to remain angry at Nova and superior so he wouldn’t have to admit Corona had every reason to be in love with Nova, and that Gecko’s magnetic pull wasn’t any stronger than Nova’s when it came to Corona.
“I suppose why I’m so silly all the time,” Nova confessed, “is because you transhumans are so serious-about everything. I guess it’s my way of helping you to get over yourselves.”
Corona and Gecko took their eyes off him and stared at one another guiltily.
“I’m more into being than you transhumans,” Nova explained, “who are more into becoming. I want to feel one with the world as I am, not as I could be. I want to feel the peace of not striving for anything, of self-acceptance. I want to feel the joy only the here and now can offer. You transhumans live solely in the future. The present is just something to be endured until you can get airborne again, like gravity holding you in place until you can refuel.”
The God Gene Page 14
