Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents

by Dean C. Moore

  “Why is that you ask?” He took another sip of his smart-water and paused for effect. “Because the Space Age is upon us. We’re no longer naïve enough to believe that we can sustain human life indefinitely, even for much longer, confined to this rock. We know of too many things now that can go wrong that we didn’t know of before. To spread humanity across the heavens in record time will require so many brainy scientists and geeks like us that if we could make everyone smarter today, to Einstein levels, it still wouldn’t be enough. Why, because while so many of those problems with bioengineering humans capable of surviving the rigors of space are beyond the capacity of even our smartest people to solve in a reasonable timeframe, it’s not the only challenge that faces us.

  “The world’s ecosystems are shot. To heal the earth and to avoid mass extinction long before we get to space will require more brain power than we have. The most powerful supercomputers today can’t predict the weather accurately even one week out. How the hell are the best AIs then to predict the butterfly effects of even a single modification to the ecosphere? Geoengineering is a buzz word but no one’s truly figured out how to do it without actually making things worse, and governments have been working on doing it for all sorts of reasons, from weather wars to counteracting desertification for decades. And they’ve made inroads so paltry it’s barely worth talking about while things continue to grow worse faster than we can offset the damages.

  “No, people, turn everyone into Tesla tomorrow, and you’d still need AIs, ASI’s, AGIs, hybrids, artificial life forms to fill all sorts of niches. The brain drain hasn’t just begun, it’s turned into a gaping black hole, taking us all down with it. Soon the only thing anyone will be able to sell is a ‘make someone smarter’ solution. The economy will be driven on nothing else.

  “Now you tell me, how can you keep a people like that enslaved? When the slaves are smarter than the masters?”

  There was dead silence. Jaws were hanging open. Even Elsa seemed shell-shocked. It took her a while to regroup. “They’ll do what they do now,” she said, “make sure the ones with access to the best tech are also the sycophants, the go-alongs to get-alongs, and the rebels are squashed, until the only ones left are the drones, a homogenized race, stratified into master thinkers and master servers.”

  “But for how long, Elsa? That’s today’s solution to yesterday’s problem. Homogenized people can’t come up with original answers to original problems by definition, only answers that every other drone has come to. You have to take the cork off the bottle. You have to free people in ways that they’ve never been free, even at the very top, even among the one percenters. No one alive today with any amount of enhancements can have even a poor inkling of the kind of intellectual and creative freedoms that await next generation enhancements.

  “But for the promise to be truly fulfilled, we each have to evolve along our own tangents, become more unique every day, until we’re unrecognizable to each other. Our common humanity will give way to bioengineered tweaks that makes us each a lifeform unto ourselves.”

  “Won’t that create even bigger problems?” Elsa said. “Most of us feel cut off from the rest of the world enough already. Relationships will be that much harder.”

  “Sure, the challenges will be greater, why wouldn’t it be so? Why waste such high-powered minds on small matters that even the unupgraded can tackle? As to loving one another, finding a common humanity in our transhumanity, that won’t be so different. There was a time perhaps when we sought out conformity. I think most of those people have died off, honestly. The girl working at McDonald’s has purple hair, the one next to her has face tattoos, and the one next to her has body piercings. Sure, it’s a pathetic attempt to find and hold on to something special about themselves in a job and in a world still more frightened of specialness than conformity. But look not to the past, Elsa, and to the past disguised as the present. For our home isn’t there. No one’s is anymore. We’ve just figured out the truth, absorbed it, internalized it ahead of the others. But the truth is the truth and it just wants to be set free, like us.”

  He could tell from the unblinking eyes and the slack jaws that they were sufficiently shell-shocked. There was no point going any further. They couldn’t absorb any more. They needed time to absorb what he gave them. He was patting them on the shoulders for grasping truths ahead of everyone else, but for that to be earned, they really needed to stew some more. He had blown their minds and in that wide open space there would be time enough for the truth to take root. And if his words weren’t the truth, they’d be back at him tomorrow with the holes they’d shot in his reasoning. Or perhaps just with their niggling doubts because their minds just weren’t big enough yet to take it all in. Because change scared people, even the ones who seemingly lived for it.

  “Go soak, people.” Roman watched them streaming out of the barn. He was not the last to go. He left Melville and Elsa together, her head lying in his lap as he stroked her hair. When Roman walked out of the barn, he gave Melville a kiss on the head before exiting.

  ***

  Melville stroked Elsa’s hair until she was recovered enough to sit up. She was still breathing through her mouth and her eyes were still dazed. “Sweetheart, it was great while it lasted, but it’s time to get real.”

  His comments focused her. “We’re real. This is real, you and I,” she said, gesturing.

  “A fool could see that you and Roman are meant to be together.”

  She shifted catlike into another pose, and yanked errant straws from the bale of hay. “He’s really not my type, as I keep saying to deaf ears.”

  “Then fake it till you make it. He’s too important to the cause. And now, indirectly, so are you. To do what he needs to do, he’s going to need you by his side. This is the future we’re talking about. Even if you don’t buy a word he’s saying, you know the best chance of a livable future for all of us is him. You want the devils to inherit paradise, just because you think the game is rigged in their favor? On that much at least you two can agree. So start there.”

  She kept shaking her head and averting her eyes the whole time he spoke. She was starting to sense the truth but in no way was she ready to hear it.

  “You just got a small taste of the honey, today.” He held up her chin and forced her to look at him. “One day you’ll be addicted like the rest of us. But it’s going to take more than a visionary to get us to the Promised Land. A lot of hard work to be done. Us drone bees have our place, but yours is by his side. Maybe with you to buffet him he will take a closer look at the present so he can shorten the period of transition, this Dark Ages that we’re in currently before a new age of reason, a more egalitarian age that he’s calling for arrives. Too many people hurting to be helped by your cynicism and defeatism. You alone won’t be able to do them any good, but I sense you do want to help them. With Roman in tow, you’ll have a chance.”

  She sighed off the mountain sitting on her chest. He parted the hair out of her eyes to help her see the future for herself a little better. At least so far as it involved Roman. “I guess it’s my turn to stew,” she said.

  “Yes, it is.” He got up and left her there staring at the empty stage where Roman once was.

  TEN

  Svena, as one of the six cyberchicks in Sabrina’s inner circle, was running surveillance on CRISPR CRAZE, a biohacker lab in downtown San Francisco. Her approach was a bit nontraditional. She was posing as a street mime pretending to be a statue, painted silver, and holding an awkward, painful pose no human could hold for more than a few seconds. She’d been holding it for hours now. Her open guitar case was collecting quite a bit of coin. She had only had to endure a dog peeing on her, which its owner dutifully yanked away on the leash, apologizing before hurrying on in embarrassment, and another midsize dog humping her calf, without any owner to pull it off. Finally it went on its way; if anything, the brief sideshow had added to her collection box, making her guise seem all the more plausible. Any number of kisses ha
d also been planted on her lips and tongues painted along her face. Anything to rattle her; nothing did. Finally the hecklers relented, and left some money for her troubles.

  It had taken her conscious control over nearly every cell in her body to stifle the skin-crawling sensations, one and all. Nearly as much concentration to override her spinal cord reflexes to squash the interlopers. The aches and pains alone associated with her tortured body positioning required hormonal secretions she had to invent on the fly to both relax her enough to keep the blood flowing to the crimped areas and maintain her muscle tone enough to not melt out of the posture. Maybe if dogs and humans alike had had a better appreciation of what was going on inside her, they’d have cut her some slack.

  So far, CRISPR CRAZE, directly opposite her on the other side of the street, had seen the comings and goings of a couple FBI agents and one NSA unit director. She’d pulled their files off the internet with the help of her mindchip, after hacking the FBI and NSA databases to match their faces. Whatever was going on inside CRISPR CRAZE it warranted a fair amount of snooping. Granted, that wasn’t saying much. Most of the DIYbio labs were being closely monitored across the country. As possible threats to national security went, DIYbio labs were actually ranked higher than nuclear weapons. Biohazards, world-population-decimating plagues, not the least among them, were cheap enough to create in a garage these days. And no less deadly. Hence the DIYbio labs’ ranking. Not everyone could get their hands on a nuke, but a CRISPR unit with which one could change the world was available for less than a hundred bucks, and all the knowhow you needed to work with it free to anyone online who bothered to inquire. That left the FBI and NSA and everyone else who mattered little choice but to befriend the very people who could give them a heads-up on anyone that needed watching. It was that or shut down the centers altogether. But that would just drive even more biohackers underground, alienate those who the authorities really couldn’t afford to alienate, and crush a burgeoning economy that now constituted forty percent of GDP and growing by five percent annually.

  Of the numerous geeks streaming in and out of CRISPR CRAZE with their project in hand, the latest one had spiked her interest the most. Perhaps for no more reason than she found him the most attractive. “Undercover” work—in both senses of the word—was greatly helped if motivation was high to get inside someone’s pants as much as their head. He’d been inside for over an hour now. Enough time to settle into his project and throw the occasional mental-break glance her way, enjoying the unexpected eye candy. She waited until his eyes were on her to come out of her pose, close the guitar case, hand it to a homeless woman begging for change—it didn’t hurt to make a good first impression—before crossing the street.

  In the process of sauntering his direction, Svena dodged speeding traffic without altering her pace or turning her head, using nothing more than her peripheral vision. When she couldn’t dodge traffic, she skipped up and over the hoods or roofs of the cars in question. She saw her mark smile at her. Just to walk smoothly, even without the expert sense of timing, was no small feat after having her body locked in a fixed position for hours. Her genetic enhancements smoothed the transitions out for her but not without a certain amount of discomfort she made sure to keep off her face.

  For the op, she’d pulled her external attachments, anything that alerted others of her biohacker status. It would take an advanced scan of her insides to reveal her triple-stranded DNA status, which was tech this low-rent body shop wouldn’t have on hand. That or a biopsy or blood sample, which she would be cautious enough not to let anyone take. As to the “silver paint” on her skin, well it would be rationalized as such, as opposed to a skin DNA alteration responding to her mindchip’s dictates.

  Svena noticed her mark was no longer flitting his eyes between her and his project, but had his attention entirely riveted on her. She smiled at him to relax him and give him a jolt of confidence.

  The bell on the glass door jangled as she opened it. All eyes rose to her and stayed there. A sixty-forty split of males to females, most working solo, but some working together. Strange having the bell on the door; these types didn’t usually brook interruptions to their concentration particularly well. But camaraderie meant a lot to this community; coming here versus working at home probably had more to do with networking than with doing real work. No less strange, but far more troubling, it’d take more effort to break into a liquor store.

  The place looked like a cooking class. With one group whipping up smoothies with their gene-altered spirulina, DNA-mutated for better taste, and even denser nutrition. Such alterations had started with CRISPR’s introduction in 2012. Apparently the quest for the perfect protein shake was never over. The kid who’d used CRISPR to design the first blue rose was here, a bouquet of his own true-Cerulean-blue roses on his desk. The kids who had eradicated colon cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s once and for all were also here, working on their latest disease eradication quest. Considering the aforementioned were all richer than God, they probably had private labs that could rival Iron Man’s Tony Stark’s labs, but they chose to work here. Again, fraternity over anonymity.

  Her mindchip continued to download their information off the internet, fed by the facial recognition algorithms in her DNA-enhanced eyes. Her eyes, a pair of mated, parallel-arrayed DNA computers had more combined data storage and processing capability than all the world’s supercomputers combined of just a few years ago. As advanced as these “kids” were—many in their twenties and thirties now—they were no match for her. By their reasoning she wouldn’t exist, or anything like her, for decades to come.

  Still, this was a good group for ferreting out who was who in the DIYbio community, where they could be found and what they might be up to. Searches of the FBI and NSA databases had turned up nothing on Roman Atman, necessitating this little field assignment.

  Between the spirulina smoothies being blended and the other scientific experiments in progress, the place smelled like one of those aquarium stores selling an assortment of tropical and salt water fish.

  Ignoring the off-putting odors, Svena sauntered over to her mark’s work station.

  “Hi!” he said, barely able to contain his excitement. He had long, stringy red hair, a trimmed beard, and looked vaguely like the Sacred Heart image of Christ. As facades go, it was definitely a bad-girl magnet, for anyone tempted to see if “Christ” could save them as well. “I’m Cristo,” he said. She nearly laughed. Of course, you are. Maybe he was conscious of his cachet with the girls and had chosen to cash in on his look-alike image with the nickname. “You’re new to our scene.”

  “Not entirely.” He smelled of red meat, Mexican beer, and red chilies. She noticed the dried chilies off to the side on his workbench in a large two gallon plastic jug.

  She glanced down at his project. He’d been operating on his forearm, still held face up. Explaining why he’d resisted the urge to rise upon seeing her, or move at all from his existing position. A desk lamp was aimed at the surgical area. He’d cleared the way to the insertion of the mindchip. His miniature clamps had stemmed the blood flow, not before making a mess of the desk area, from what she could see, with all the blood-dampened cloths. As he picked up the chip and inserted it in the void he’d made, he waited for it to attach itself to the severed nerves and blood vessels which it would also commence to heal as a segue to building better communications with Cristo’s brain.

  Leaning in for a closer look, she said, “You’ve gone with a proprietary model mindchip. Your own design?”

  “That’s right. How…? Are you one of us?”

  “No, just a fan girl. I’m afraid my talents lie elsewhere.”

  “What in, if you don’t mind me asking?” He took his eyes off her to make sure the chip had wired itself up and rerouted his nerves and miniature blood vessels before undoing the clamps. He wiped off the exposed area with an alcohol sponge and then closed up the flap of skin with some thin sticky strips, the kinds usually used
in lieu of stitches. Popped a couple antibacterial pills. She pretended to be too engrossed in his surgery to answer his question. At least until he reached for a cold beer in the portable fridge on his workstation counter. He popped the top and took a hit off the bottle.

  “I’m with a Swedish escort service,” she said. He spit the beer out of his mouth. “My services go for three thousand a night. Of course, we’re highly trained. Takes a couple years to master what we know, assuming you’re an adept.”

  “And are you an adept?” he said, nearly stuttering.

  “I mastered the program in a year. So, yeah.”

  He was flustered enough to forget he’d just taken out a beer and reached for another one, popped the top. Then, trying to disguise his befuddlement, he did what he should have done earlier, offered her one of the opened beers. When she shook her head to indicate “no” to the beers, he took another look at her and decided he’d hold on to both beers.

  “Must be a hard life, though, pretending to be someone different for each John. Wouldn’t you like to be with someone who’d just let you be yourself?”

  “Depends. I mean I do enjoy a certain amount of roleplay,” she said stroking the shaft of the sweating beer bottle with his hand still on it.

  He realized she was flirting with him and smiled. “This is a setup, right? You’re a reporter or something. I’m on candid camera or whatever the hell the modern equivalent is?”