Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents

by Dean C. Moore

  “That your way of saying you approve?”

  “Damn right I approve.” He leaned into whisper in her ear. “How much is this going to cost me?”

  She smiled. “One of your stars, if my genius plan turns to shit.”

  “All your genius plans turn to shit. It’s what I like most about you. You want to be a career officer you need things to fail and fail often. Nothing puts an end to combat faster than success. And then what would I do, flip burgers?”

  Sabrina restrained another smile.

  “What is with the getup anyway?” he asked, seeing her reflection in a mirror as they passed and reaching for one of his nitrate pills to cover the gasp. Her evident Latin blood would do more than add fire to her temperament; it would add years to her beauty, the extra melatonin in her skin protecting her from the brash rays of the sun. Then again, considering his own mug was as wrinkled as a Shar-Pei’s, there might well be more to anti-aging than caramel-colored skin.

  “You can’t just talk the talk when you go cyberpunk, you have to walk the walk. The average biohacker geek is eighteen to twenty-four. The ones that are sixty are still going on sixteen. They love intimidating women who have complete mastery over them in matters of the heart. After all, they’re the gods everywhere else now that this age is all about technology, and who’s got the latest, not who’s got the biggest.”

  “I can’t say I miss the good old days,” Chao said, eying the guards posted by each door on their rounds. They were a fairly equal mix of male and female. And with their shiny silver tech attachments popping out of their foreheads, temples, mounted to their eyes and ears, wrapped around their hands and wrists, snaking along their bodies in any number of ways with their intricate art nouveau designs, the operatives all seemed like cyborgs to him. Ironically, they were primitives next to Sabrina and her Sexy Six entourage of girls, none of whom sported such “anachronistic adornments.” The Magnificent Seven’s biohacking was far more sophisticated, going on at a genetic level.

  As Sabrina’s girls came into view, Chao asked, “Since when did super-soldiers go all female?”

  “Those are still largely male, the ones that aren’t robots. My genetically enhanced ladies do better at subterfuge, spy work, psy-ops games, infiltration, planning coups and takeovers, pulling the strings in the background. A combination of their superior multitasking and their psych profiling abilities.”

  “You want cunning and treachery, you want a female. I get it. My last five wives will be happy to give testimony to that and God knows I got nothing to refute them with.” He ogled the latest faces passing them by as if on a cyborg carousel, though they were standing still; it was just the warped perspective given by their rapid strolling. “So, what, your girls are here providing cover for you?”

  “Something like that. The hive mind can only learn by doing. So we infiltrated the pentagon, shut her down temporarily, so we can have this little chat in private.”

  Chao only now realized that the “cyborgs” weren’t just standing impassively like the guards outside Buckingham palace, they’d been hacked, their attachments used to maintain them in an unblinking trance.

  “Damn. Remind me not to get on your bad side.” He began noticing the fallen male bodies, gagged and bound and struggling as if in his S&M fantasy. They didn’t appear to be enjoying themselves nearly so much. The co-opted security officers noticeable behind doors in the process of closing. Chao’s mouth ran dry with just a lingering taste of salt and bitter lemon.

  It occurred to him, glancing at her again that she really did look like the queen bee, something about the confidence she exuded, the extra sparkle in her eyes that seemed to see across eternity, her refusal to wear anything but black, unlike the rest of her girls whose skimpy leather outfits ran a gamut of colors; camouflage wasn’t her intent. Something told Chao she wanted to alert her enemy as to who was coming after them. It was more likely to intimidate them than endanger her. “And just what is your plan for going after Ethan Hawk?”

  “I’ll tell you, if you’ll tell me how a Chinese Red Army officer rises to four star general in the U.S armed forces?”

  Chao smiled without showing any teeth. And he walked with his hands clasped behind his back, the only way he could avoid marching like a tin soldier from habit, with his arms and legs flying in two part harmony. “When your oligarchs undermined your democracy until it looked little different than our fascist regime, we suddenly had a lot more in common and a lot more to teach you. What can I say? Being a corrupt bastard kind of opens a world of possibilities to you.”

  She snorted. “Fair enough.”

  “Next year I might run for President of Brazil.”

  She laughed, though she hated herself for doing so.

  “And the answer to my question?” Chao pressed.

  “I isolated Ethan’s slime trail on the internet, the research he dug up on each of the oligarchs,” she explained. “By the additional files opened on each one, I can tell you which order he’s going in. The ones at the head of the list he needed more information on first, so small surprise Unser was his first victim. Based on the same logic, he’ll be going after Willis Lad next.”

  “Didn’t he make his money in oil? Good choice. Bastards are destroying the earth.”

  Sabrina threw him a wary glance.

  Chao shrugged. “I own a nature preserve in Costa Rica, the only government on Earth that has enough sense to protect its natural beauty and its tourist industry. I can’t afford oil spills in neighboring countries draining into my lowlands, or smog blowing in from China or nuclear waste washing ashore from Japan. Just because I’m a one percenter does not mean I’m in automatic agreement with every other corrupt bastard on the planet. It’s a shark eat shark world, especially among the one percent.”

  “All the same, you will be assisting me in apprehending one Ethan Hawk?”

  “After he’s done killing Willis Lad, I’ll be happy to swoop in. But please don’t ruin my day by catching him first.”

  “Let me guess, you just want to guide Ethan’s decisions as to which oligarchs to take out.”

  “Don’t you?”

  She smiled the way a cat does. “I can’t promise the man we capture will be of any use to either of us. The best way to him is via his upgrades and that usually means frying some part of his brain by overloading his system with and EMP pulse or…”

  “I get it. His greatest assets are also his greatest weaknesses. Just remember, that goes both ways, if he turns out to be a better hacker than you are.”

  Sabrina smiled at his naïveté. “No one is a better hacker than me.”

  She stopped abruptly. For his part, he was pleased the ordeal was over. His titanium hip did not make for brisk walking. Even with the Demerol he’d taken in advance of the walk, he was in excruciating pain. If she only knew how much his round fat face was masking his twisted, grimacing facial muscles underneath. “It’s only fair to tell you it was hubris that landed me this job. If I stayed in China a day longer they were going to execute me.”

  “People like us never die, general, as you’ve argued so well yourself. How do you kill pond scum exactly? The lowest form of life is also the most adaptable.”

  EIGHT

  “We have to stop meeting like this,” General Chao said matching Sabrina’s stride as he stepped up to her and strolled alongside her, along the main thoroughfare of the zeppelin. “I see your people are deployed throughout this gas bag, disguised as upgraded serving staff. No doubt they’ll serve up some unexpected treats, all right.”

  “Willis never lands the zeppelin. It’s a flying fortress. We had no better option than to deploy here if we want to keep him alive.”

  “Which we really don’t, but I get your meaning. You sure you’ve covered every contingency?”

  “What I haven’t he has, and between us if there are holes in the net big enough to slip through, you and your people will be there to see Ethan only falls into your welcoming arms. By the time you’re
dong torturing compliance out of him he might just be the perfect soldier, and able to sing opera a key or two higher than anyone would have thought possible, what with all that practiced screaming.”

  “You’re given to the most poetic flights of fancy. I feel at heart you’re a true artist.”

  “At heart I’m a true serial killer who needed a way to stay out of jail. That’s exactly why I’ll catch Ethan. We couldn’t be more alike if we tried.”

  “But he’s crazy.”

  “Like I said.” She broke away from him to issue some last minute directives to her people.

  It slowly dawned on Chao, after peeling his eyes off her butt, that the people sitting around the bar and dining tables were Willis Lad’s own security people. They seemed to run the gamut from ex-NAVY SEALS to Chinese modern-day Ninjas and Shaolin monks. They had apparently been given orders to take a backseat to the action tonight. Chao doubted they could quell their natural reflexes. But he imagined the warning was clear: Get in the way of the cyberchicks contingent, and they’d be going down too.

  The shiver running up his spine could have been triggered by the thought, or perhaps it was just the brisk air blowing through the opened windows. The wind was singing a tune not unlike the Sirens that endeavored to lure Ulysses to his death. Chao grabbed a glass off the tray of one of the “waitresses” walking by. Downed the shot of courage. The scotch tasted like gasoline. He felt as if he were burning alive from the inside. Hopefully it wasn’t a harbinger of things to come.

  ***

  Ethan took aim with the shoulder mounted RPG, and sent the shell hurtling towards Lad’s zeppelin. The dirigible looked as big as the Titanic. Ethan thought the explosion would play well against the sky at sunset. There were the fans to consider, as always. His Quadcopter AI-onboard hive mind cameras were already covering the event from every possible angle. Scorsese at Woodstock had nothing on him.

  The shell penetrated the zeppelin’s skin like a needle through a water balloon. The explosion was epic. Five star rating on a 1 to 5 star scale, all the way. The blast like the smack of thunder. The heat damn near seared his retinas even from here. The smell of roasted seagulls accosted his nasal cavities, the hapless birds victims of “wrong place wrong time.” The taste of explosives lay on his tongue, too complex to be decoded by his primitive taste buds. The pain in his hand alerted him to the fact that he could relax his trigger finger now. As he did so, Ethan could only describe the feeling running through him as orgasmic.

  But then something strange.

  The explosion didn’t set off other explosions, and there definitely should have been a ripple effect. Ethan had already calculated the time it would take to set off each subsequent blast.

  Not only did the ripple effect not happen, the original blast was snuffed out as if a team of a hundred firefighters were on hand with flame retardant chemicals.

  And the damn hole in the side of the zeppelin.

  It was fixing itself!

  Ethan tilted the lighthouse beacon up at the zeppelin rolling by in disbelief. As if nothing had happened.

  “Self-healing smart materials used in the zeppelin construction?” His mind continued to run through the possibilities. “Nanite hive minds permeating the atmosphere to quell any explosion or fire on the spot? Capable of repairing any damage in an instant? How did I not see this?” His euphoria had given way to a mixture of queasiness and feverishness. The blood pumping to his head pulsed his veins and hammered his brain; he was rapidly entering aneurism country.

  There was only one way to be sure he wasn’t fucking with his own head. He ran the tapes. The rest of his camera brigade was already aboard the zeppelin in the form of naked-to-the eye insects.

  ***

  Sabrina was touring the Zeppelin’s catwalks, well away from the living spaces, examining possible points of weakness and of infiltration. On the surface, Zeppelin designs hadn’t changed much from the Hindenburg days. It was still mostly boney, stainless-steel skeleton providing the structure and air bags filled with helium keeping the damn thing aloft. But it was in the things that weren’t visible where the real changes were. The most obvious of them being the substitution of the more flammable hydrogen for the far less flammable helium. But that was still old-school tech. As to the new-school tech… Well, the subject got a lot less abstract in a hurry when an RPG shell tore through the Zeppelin, just yards from her.

  Her CRISPR-modified DNA kicked into high-gear. The third DNA strand had been added entirely for battle purposes. Her nervous system had hence long been supplanted by a much faster one capable of light-speed transmissions. The buckyball strands ensured her nerves didn’t get frayed even under the most extreme circumstances; this situation qualified. The added cellular scaffolding to absorb most any explosive impact was already in place. Just some last second secretions to match it entirely to the explosive force of the RPG. Mostly all her upgrades did for her for now was allow her to relax into the blast radius and give her the second or two head-start for the latest cellular modifications to take place.

  The rest was on her smart suit, not leather, but hive-mind, AI-on board, morphing material. It quickly grew over her hands and bare feet, her chest, neck and head to cover all exposed areas. The suit would retard the flames and absorb the heat of the blast, even a lot of the concussion wave. It would synthesize the air she needed to breathe until the atmosphere was breathable again. It was highly possible she didn’t need any of her genetic alterations with what the suit could do. But it could only do so much. Past a certain critical threshold, it didn’t matter how well the suit held, the soft, gooey human inside would be turned to mush just on impact, like with those unyielding, solid metal cars from the 1930s and 40s.

  Of course, living through a blast meant enduring tortures of the damned no unupgraded human nervous system would ever know. Her rather steep price for salvation. Her blood boiled when the several thousand degree heat exceeded the suit’s shielding capacity. Her lungs burned as if they were breathing hot kettle water when the air temperature also climbed above the suit’s deflective limits. Her eyes exploded like custard cream pies left too long in the oven. She could feel herself erupting out of the suit like lava escaping a volcano. It all surpassed even her extraordinary ability to take punishment.

  When she opened her eyes again she realized she’d lost consciousness, if only for a moment, while accelerated healing was undertaken by her triple-stranded DNA. The zeppelin’s scaffolding, torn apart by the explosion, had regrown around her in an effort to heal itself. She was trapped like a fly in a web.

  Sabrina peeled back the scaffolding, acting in the role of a human can opener. Her cellular modifications, trying to keep pace with her thinking, shared the work with the suit, which likewise tweaked itself as now more strength was needed, less blast-resilience. The nano in the suit wasn’t just self-repairing, it was self-modifying, in keeping with the directives of the hive mind and the self-evolving AI algorithms floating about in the hive mind. The tech wouldn’t be available in the public sphere probably for another twenty years. That was the thing about the rich. They lived in their own time zone, well insulated by their enemies trapped in the past relative to them, dead and gone and belonging to a bygone era even without knowing it. DARPA-like entities existed to breach the gap, but these days, the really advanced prototypes were in the hands of the corporate sphere, her masters, the oligarchs.

  As soon as she’d shed her “cobwebs,” the steel scaffolding regrew in the shape it was meant to take originally. She’d need to consult the cameras to see what really went down.

  ***

  Ethan was getting nothing but darkness. His ability to see through time and space stymied by his insect robocams being destroyed in the blast.

  He had no choice now. He had to hack the dirigible’s habitat AI, risk leaving a slime trace. Each one left behind gave his enemies a chance to profile him better. Never a good thing for someone who liked to keep them guessing.

  Another few seco
nds and he was in.

  Damn!

  He’d seriously underestimated Willis Lad. Ethan’s camera p.o.v.s were currently being provided by Lad’s atmospheric nano swarms, small enough to ride out any explosion, transfer and dissipate most any amount of heat, and able to subdivide responsibilities into smaller sub-swarms. The sub-swarm Ethan was in now was giving him the pictures and the audio from several thousand nanites that combined their minute views of the spectacle into a true omnidirectional, insect-like view of the explosion. But it was the AI algorithms floating around the hive mind at its highest level that was of the greatest interest. It was they who saw to it that the morphable nanites not just snuffed out the explosion as rapidly as they occurred, but handled repairs of the dirigible, supplementing the efforts of the self-healing, smart materials. When their limits had been reached, the atmospheric swarm lent its mind power to get the healing necessary back within the range of what the smart materials could handle.

  The stage reset in under a minute, that left only the humans exposed to the blast. Looking into their fate led to revelation number two.