Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents

by Dean C. Moore

  Willis Lad had hired out. Supplanting his otherwise impressive security detail with one even better. Female biohackers. All loaded for bear and all playing this game a few levels above his competitive ability.

  The cyberchicks mulling about the dirigible at the time of the explosion in their dubious disguises of maître D’s, bellhops, bartenders, table busers, reacted to the RPG before it exploded. In the fractions of a second at their disposal, they hurtled themselves and their charges against the walls just outside the RPG’s immediate blast radius, far enough outside it anyway for their other adaptations to absorb the brunt of the shockwave. Their smart-suits, skimpy enough to look painted on by a tattoo artist, grew bat-like wings to shroud them and the men they were protecting. Those shrouds may as well have been bombproof casings. All this, mind you, before Lad’s highly trained assassins could even think to duck for cover.

  Fine, so the cyberchicks’ nervous systems were a tad more jacked up than his. And their nifty smart-suits definitely made them much harder kill targets than he was used to. But that’s not what really scared him.

  The girls, fighting human shock responses, and rerouting precious AI mindchip computing power to the task of adapting on the spot to ride out a blast none of them was prepared for had created a brief moment of vulnerability Ethan was able to hack. Once inside their mindchips, he had access to their entire schematics, all of their upgrades. That information should have been more than enough to tilt the scales back his way. But it wasn’t their cybernetic upgrades that were the real threat, especially now that he knew what he had to work around. It was the CRISPR-enhanced DNA. The women had a third strand entirely devoted to on-the-fly battle modifications. They only had to think of what to do next, and their bodies morphed accordingly. It wasn’t like being one of the X-Men. It was like being all of them, whichever one served the situation better. This was one of the most holy shit! modifications he’d ever encountered. It made rumors of Roman’s successful neuronet implant sound like the booby prize instead of the jackpot.

  Ethan’s only chance against that kind of adaptive ability was that it took seconds to engage. Even with the human hybrid DNA, making them half carbon based, half silicon based lifeforms in order to facilitate the rapid metamorphoses, seconds to someone like him was like minutes. It might be all the advantage he needed. Emphasis on might be. The reality was, there was still too many of them, and in the time he might have to neutralize two or three of them, the rest would be upon him.

  Boarding that dirigible now would be sheer suicide.

  Okay, so lone genius could only get him so far. If he wanted to get further, he needed to be networked like these girls. Why is it good people have so few friends and contacts, and evil shits are networked out the ass? Pick up a phone and some despot somewhere owes them a favor. And you put enough sub-geniuses working in cahoots together, and it was enough to trump a rogue genius like him any day. Shit! Shit! Shit! He should have seen this coming. However and whatever for this cabal of cyberchicks was formed, they had access to the best tech money could buy and the kind of breakthroughs that it takes armies of scientists on the move to procure, not some tinkering 250 IQ smart ass working solo in his basement like dear Ethan. He may have been able to tunnel his way into the future, but their wormhole was bigger and badder than his.

  Screw it. No one, but no one was getting in his way.

  Man, he could really use his old biohacker Daytona collective of hippy freaks living up in Oregon about now. If only he could have mobilized them into a similarly well-honed attack force. Damn their peace-loving hearts. Where was his Goebbels to spew the propaganda needed to turn them into a fighting force that could take on these cyberchicks? Fate was such the bitch.

  Fine, Ethan, so you’re going in solo to certain death. Playing the underdog really isn’t your thing, but you do learn fast.

  Ethan broke the mind link with the zeppelin’s habitat AI so he could think in peace without risking someone backwards hacking all the way into the deepest recesses of his mind. He’d need to keep his private thoughts private if he had a chance in hell of advancing on this chessboard.

  First things first. He stopped fighting the impulse to heave and vomited over the lighthouse balcony. He let himself convulse as if he were in the middle of a grand-mal seizure. It was just better to surf the wave of explosive rage than risk an aneurism. He balled his hands into fists as he stood there riding the imaginary vibrating bed and roared. The acoustic blast, he was certain, would have blown up the zeppelin all over again, if only it were still within range.

  ***

  Willis Lad was dancing the fandango with his android sex slave. She was all smooth plastic and chrome surfaces. Sexy as shit. Her alloys would never wear out. She was the perfect sex machine. Sure, he could have afforded the best human escorts in the world, and even gone with cyberenhanced ones, but how many of those came with dildoe attachments and vibrator functions for giving it to him up the ass while dancing across the ballroom floor? And as he melted into submission, could levitate his fat ass off the ground so he was bouncing on her chrome phallus, inches off the ground like jelly wobbling in a jar just set in the refrigerator? How many could suck his tired, limp cock until they breathed life into it, and for that matter, could be on their knees servicing it twenty-four seven, as he went about his business? No, real women, upgraded or not, were so passé.

  He was barely conscious, hammer-fucked into a twilight state, when the smoke grenade went off on the dance room floor, as if part of some stage act, as if the director was just enhancing the atmosphere.

  Willis snapped back into the moment, climbed off his sex slave that was holding him off the floor like an exoskeleton supporting a whale trying to walk with its prehensile limbs no longer up to the task.

  And he ran for the safe room.

  Shut the door behind him with his right palm pounding the red button.

  He breathed easier once inside. The girls would get to whoever it was in time.

  “Nice of you to join me,” Ethan said.

  ***

  Willis turned to see him, well, as much as anyone ever saw him, his face forever obscured by the pixilation of the nano-stocking stretched over his façade. It messed with any eyes or cameras that relied on EMF waves to traffic his visage to whatever senses they had to work with, enhanced or not. At the thought of being locked inside the safe room with the man trying to kill him, Willis turned from his customary pale white to a sickly shade of purplish-blue, like with people who’ve been deprived of oxygen. The coloration was usually found just on the lips of the deceased, but in his case, the reaction was more full-body.

  “You can’t… it’s not possible. How…?”

  “I think we’re past all that, don’t you?” Ethan said, enjoying the worm squirming on the hook. “The interesting thing was how easy it was to get to you. Now I have a theory about that. You see, I don’t think they want to stop me from killing you. They just want to stop me from getting off the ship. So, big welcome sign hanging that says ‘come on in!” and exit sign that says, sort of like my favorite song, ‘you can come and go anytime you like but you can never leave.”

  Ethan picked up the stress ball and squeezed it. “You think they decided we could do with one less oil baron pressing the world to stay in the past, avoid adopting those niftier, cleaner energy technologies? I mean, now that there are plenty multibillionaires on that side of the fence, you know, the ones who actually prefer the future to the past, the Facebooks and the like. Oh, they’ll keep the old world centralization of power in their hands, thank you very much, just not the old school tech, which has, after all, outlived its usefulness.”

  He continued squeezing the stress ball. “That being the case, I’m betting they want to hold me, hire me out to kill off just the oligarchs they want killed off as opposed to my more thorough-going list. What do you think? I mean, you’re no newcomer to playing mental chess at this level.” Ethan handed Willis the stress ball. “I’m sorry, you probably
need this more than I do.”

  Willis grabbed it and stuffed it as far up his ass as he could reach. Ethan grimaced. “Interesting coping mechanism. I guess we all have them. Me, I get all chatty when I can’t handle the amount of ecstasy flowing through my body at the thought of ending one of you sick bastards.”

  “You’re right, of course. It’s the only thing that makes sense.” Willis was doing well for a man that couldn’t breathe without panting and sweating as if he were standing in a steam room, and wavering, as if he were a top about to fall over. “What if I agreed to close down my oil interests, move everything into clean technologies, underwrite even my competitors, anyone with some damn eco-friendly agenda?”

  “I see we’re at the negotiating state of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s seven stages of grief and dying. Is it seven, or six, I can never remember?”

  “What if I sign over all my money to you, let you do what you want with it? I’m not too old to make another fortune.” He held out his hands placatingly, “the right way this time.”

  “I’m afraid you really have nothing to offer me. You see, I’ve already got access to all your money, all your power. The second you die you will be replaced by an AI, whose algorithms I wrote, who will administer your company free of ego, free of ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ psychology. Free of corrupting influences, though those folks will of course still try to get around her. Only she’ll be a lot smarter, and able to out-evolve any amount of mind-power they throw at her. The only thing that could really stymie her is other corporations putting an equally capable AI in charge, but to be equally capable it would have to subordinate itself to the greater good. Only way to maximize the brain’s capacity, which I admit is an Aristotelian argument entirely wasted on you. If those corporations were to band together, they’d have enough mind power to keep her in check. But why would they? They’d be running on the same principles just to outcompete their competition. More likely, alliances will form, making my AI more insurmountable still. Your era is over, Willis, and you with it.”

  Ethan held out a cattle prod, one of Willis’s sex toys, only emitting at a setting that was distinctly too high for his weak heart. He’d no doubt kept it here as an additional de-stressor for his sex slave to wield on him while he waited for danger to pass. Pity he was too panicked to think of bringing her inside. She might have offered him some defense.

  Willis danced at the end of the cattle prod, doing the herky-jerky, until he collapsed on top of Ethan. “Great way to take out the opposition. I swear you guys are lethal even in death.” With some audible strain, Ethan pushed the fat man off of him, checked for a pulse. “Well, you’re clinically dead, but you know how it is these days? The bastards probably have some tech that will bring you back to life if they can get to you in the next thirty minutes or so.” He pulled out his Glock and emptied all fifteen .45 caliber shells into Willis’s head. “Let’s see them bring you back from that.”

  Ethan pocketed the pistol and sighed. “I suppose the bad guys will be coming for me now. Or the good guys, depending on where you land on this perpetual debate of libertarianism versus social progressivism.”

  Ethan exited the safe room to find the cyberchicks spread out across the dance floor. “Let me guess, this is not a fresh take on Chorus Line. Too bad. You definitely have all the right stuff.”

  “We’re just here to help you take your social reform to the next level, Ethan,” Sabrina said, walking around him in her stilettos, gliding her finger over his form. Her touch was electric; he just wanted to channel it the same way Popeye did whenever Olive Oil gave him a kiss, by levitating parallel to the ground and convulsing wildly. Somehow he managed to ground the charge instead. She ripped off his shirt to expose his chest. “Yes, much better.” She continued tracing her finger over him and surveying him from all sides as she circled him. He continued to fight to keep enough blood going to his brain to think with.

  “Fine. I’ll work for you.”

  “What, no fight?”

  “I know what I’m up against. Might take a few of you down, despite the long odds, but there’s no way I’m making it out of this room alive. Even if I did, you’d just reprogram me. So why fight the inevitable?”

  “Why indeed? Still you don’t strike me as the lay down and roll over type.”

  “I’m not. So long as I follow your agenda, I stay alive. Gives me time to tool up, ready myself to turn the tables on you. Fairer fight for you. Like me, you prefer a good challenge. It’s the only thing that gets you out of bed in the morning.”

  She smiled and relaxed, but didn’t relent with the coquettish routine. “Works for me.” She let her hand drop. “Girls, clear a path, we don’t want to seem ungracious to our guest.”

  He took a few steps towards the door. Turned back to face Sabrina. “Does that kittenish number work on all the nerdy boys?”

  She smiled. “Not all.”

  He turned his back on her. “Oh, Ethan, one more thing. I know you are on to our three-stranded DNA defenses.”

  He held his startle response in check. “I see the queen bee’s recovery time in the wake of an explosion is superior to her minions. Why am I not surprised?”

  “Should you undertake that genetic modification on yourself without access to our resources,” Sabrina warned, “well, could be ugly. Even if you succeed magnificently, still takes months for the upgrades to take full effect. You don’t have months to fulfill our agenda. Mere weeks. So don’t think you’ve bought yourself anything here.”

  “Haven’t I? I’ve got the goddess of cyberpunk giving me coaching tips on how to stay alive.” He caught her smile in the mirrors as he finished exiting the dance studio.

  The girls closed in on Sabrina. “You were painting him with nano the entire time,” one of them said.

  “It’ll infiltrate his mind without him realizing. Control him or destroy him, if it comes to that. Either way, I’m happy to give him plenty of rope. I have one too many boy-toy sex slaves as it is. Gets boring after a while.” She threw a cutting glance at Willis’s sex slave. Sighed. “You’re really taking down the brand, girl.”

  She stormed out of the studio, her smiling-menacingly entourage in tow. “It’s time to put the chorus section to work. Starting tomorrow,” Sabrina instructed, “each of you will have your own biohacker enclave to infiltrate. I want a line on this Roman Atman. We need to find out if the rumors about his neuronet implant being successful are true.”

  “How hard do you want us to press?”

  “Not at all. We play nice for now. Win more bees with honey as they say. Use your beguiling natures to wheedle past their best defenses and you won’t need to hurt a hair on their nerdy little heads. You know the routine girls, now get to it.”

  NINE

  Melville sat in the audience, looking worse for wear than Shelly’s Frankenstein monster. Third degree burns covered most every inch of his surface. Reconstructive surgery after the car accident wasn’t exactly complete; he couldn’t afford the rest. As a result, none of the planes of his face was right. Everything remained broken and at odd angles. He made a Picasso look good. For all that, he usually did pretty well with the girls. Mostly the Goths who were lost in Shelly’s era in their mind. For them it was just dress up, but he was the real thing, so they adored him. But they weren’t the ones adoring him this day.

  Instead, Elsa had her leg draped over his and was sneaking smooches in the middle of Roman’s sermon on the mount. It’s just a temporary setback, Roman. Don’t let the fact that you’re red in the face and everyone knows why and they’re only weakly biting off their giggles get to you. There are bigger things at stake here, like saving the world, and more importantly, saving the future.

  Roman cleared his throat. This was his room to work, not hers. The stadium seating was provided by the same bales of hay set up to accommodate the movie screen, which would normally stretch behind him. But the stage was his tonight.

  “They’re 3D printing homes
in China that the middle class couldn’t afford just a few years ago, and giving them away for free to the lowest of the low. Ram-earth homes that are immune to the savages of weather. They’re doing the same in India and Pakistan and even here in the U.S., God forbid. Though here we make people work off the low cost with community service. They’ve got people living in tents with dirt floors in the Mid-East, sure, but inside them are 50” flat-screen LED TVs, also given away…”

  “Because as it turns out the best way to program people into mindless sheep is to give them a free TV,” Elsa said, falling naturally into the role of heckler. “And what they fail to tell you about the poorest of the poor all over the world living better than ever is that everyone else is now living at their level too. Everything stripped from them, their dignity, their capacity to hold down a job because as it turns out any robot at a fraction of the cost can do it better and without taking sick days and bellyaching all the while.” She got some claps.

  Roman took a sip of his smart water. Figuring how to best handle this. There was no point going back and forth with his cup half-full outlook against Elsa’s cup half-empty mindset. They were too evenly matched. “I grant you the present is shit. It’s why we’re all escaping into the future.” Some claps accompanied his remark and whistles. “We can get there ahead of the rest of them because we’re more technically endowed, do-it-yourselfers, but the time is coming when the most technically backwards sort will be able to pull off what we’re doing. The technology just gets cheaper and more widespread every day. You can’t contain a revolution when everybody is too smart to be duped. And how far off is that, you ask?” He was slipping into his Trinidadian accent. His mother told stories, and to this day he couldn’t help but channel her in a way every time he held court. “The honest answer is I don’t know. You can bet the old world order will do everything they can to prevent that day from ever arriving. But here’s the irony, they need smart people more than ever. There’s a worldwide shortage of them. And even they are rocking the mind-expanding cocktails, guzzling down nootropics. Ray Kurzweil spends what, a million dollars a year just on supplements, to keep his mind from failing and to keep him forever young. Mind you, while every corporation in the world is working on how to make people smarter, live longer, and more disease free, because as it turns out, each day closer we get to the future, the more we need everyone to be smarter and around for a lot longer than they are now.