He furrowed his eyebrows at her, sighed, and lowered the gun. He was so lost in character, so far this was just another James Bond film, one he hadn’t seen before, but one in which he would always regain the upper hand. Just time to switch tactics, that’s all.
“So what is it?” he said. “Tell me.”
“That’s for me to know and you to guess.” She got up and started fixing her hair in the mirror.
“Nanococktails, maybe, could attend to most of the wound healing. But the tech just isn’t that advanced yet. I keep a close watch on DARPA’s latest projects. They’re working on stuff like this, and it’s still years, if not decades, off.” He looked inwards as he continued to wrestle with the conundrum. “CRISPR genetic modifications? Christ, it would take hundreds, thousands, maybe more. But you couldn’t anticipate any possible assault?” He’d been reaching under the bed for something. By the time she paid any attention, he was hitting her with the shock paddles, intending to stop her heart. It would only get it starting again if it had already stopped. She didn’t look impressed, so he merely gasped and dropped the paddles. “You’d have to be able to alter yourself on the fly.” Trailing off, mumbling more to himself and pacing, he said, “It’s the only thing that makes any sense.”
He stepped back towards the door, into the hall, put as much distance between them as possible. “If you could just turn to face me, please.” He was sounding anxious, even desperate, by Bond standards anyway.
She turned to face him as he charged her head on. Tackled her right through the bedroom window hard enough to send her flying off the cliff into the ocean. He himself landed just at the edge of the cliff, fighting to hold on. He scrambled back up and peered down, expecting to find the wreckage of her body on the rocky shore below.
Instead, she was levitating back up towards him. “I do love running experiments with you, Cristo. It’s your tireless quest for perfection that most attracts me to you.”
He reached into his jacket pocket, took out a yo-yo, and started tossing it, making it do tricks in his hands, starting with “walk the dog.” “Was going to use my garroting yo-yo to take your head off, rather creatively, I might add. Now I just need it to soothe my nerves, and center me after this latest fiasco.”
He was muttering now, as he did “rock-the-baby” with the yo-yo. “Yes, yes, of course,” he said, staring transfixed at his own trick. “A third strand of DNA, interwoven with the other two to handle the on-the-fly cellular modifications necessary for the perfect battle soldier.” He spun out and reeled in the toy as a transition to setting up “the brain twister” trick next, still using the meditation device to help him think. “That or the junk DNA, most of our DNA is junk, over ninety-percent, actually, swapped out for something far more useful. But, my God, the amount of techies involved… no one company…” He glanced up at her as he let go of the latest trick, looking more betrayed than ever. “The entire military-industrial complex is in on this?”
“Of course it is. Did you nerds working on a shoestring budget really think you were going to pioneer the future, show it to me ahead of anyone else?”
“But that’s what I’ve been doing the whole time!” he said, pacing and gesturing. He took out his compact, saw what a mess his hair was, said, “Hold this.” He handed her the compact aimed at him and took out his brush to attend his hair in the blustery wind. “My James Bond car. I 3-D printed that! Does more than any one in any of the films ever did. I showed you, took you on a ride. How many attackers did we blow away?”
She smiled. “I had to call in a favor just so you’d have some attackers. You were so lost in character at that point, you didn’t question enemies showing up at every turn.”
Finished hair-spritzing his hair to hold up to gale force winds before the compact mirror, he returned the spritzer, the brush, and the compact to his inside jacket pockets. “The… the really cool helicopter that shapeshifts better than a Transformer Robot… I 3-D printed that one too. Flew you not just over the volcano but into it. You trying to tell me you got cooler stuff than that?” Without the metrosexual instruments in hand, his freed up hands were flying about her face better than an orchestra conductor’s without his stick.
She grimaced, feeling sorry for him. She had never intended to hurt him to this degree. Figured he would mature in record time around her so this wouldn’t register as the love of his life gone wrong, at least not in a first-love sense of the word. And if it did, she was to make sure to mature him enough so he’d recover quickly. So much for her fine handiwork. “We have way cooler stuff, Cristo. Did you really think some rogue genius hanging out by himself was going to outplay tens of thousands of interlinked PhD minds around the globe, even if none of them was half as bright as you?”
He flicked his fingers, pointed at her shakily. “That’s why you’ve been so interested in Roman Atman. Pumping me for information on him. I burned through every one of my biohacker contacts for you, called in every favor. I know more about that guy than he knows about himself.”
“Everything except where to find him.”
“What, all so you could recruit the best of us? Assuming he is the best of us and the rumors are true. So you could squash him like a bug for being the first real threat to the powers that be?”
“No one’s a threat to us, Cristo. I’m sorry you had to find out this way.”
“Was any of it real? Between us, I mean? Did you ever have true feelings for me?”
The high breezes coming off the ocean was threatening to blow them both away, erase this very moment from time. The whistling sound the wind was making every bit as mournful as an orchestra coming in on cue in some movie. He’d had to shout over it. “Yes, from the beginning,” she shouted back. “I’ve come to love you no less than you love me.”
“Then what…? Where do we go from here? You fly into the sunset in your 3D printed helicopter or I kill you?”
“You mean I fly away in my helicopter, thinking I’m making a clean getaway, and you kill me. In true Bond fashion. In character to the end. What a pair we make.”
“Yes.”
He stood staring at her, wrecked. The pain in his face was all over his body now. His hands were literally shaking with emotions. Despite his earlier preening making her think of Preston and the rest of Sabrina’s pawns, he couldn’t be more unlike them now if he tried. The pawns were cold as ice, possibly incapable of real emotion, whereas Cristo overflowed with them.
“I suppose there’s one other possibility. You could come with me. Join us. I’m part of a cabal of seven super-soldiers. All female. It would be quite the harem for you.”
“Work to thwart the rebellion, you mean, the people pushing for a fairer world, where everyone shares in the spoils, an Age of Abundance, where we can all live like gods, not just you?”
“Could you get your mind around that?”
The winds quieted just as he shouted, “Never!” The unnecessary force behind the word perhaps communicated his true sentiment all the better. “So long as I’m alive I’d do everything I could to destroy you and what you stand for. I don’t care how much I love you.”
“And I love you for it.”
“Go on, get it over with.”
She smiled ruefully, the pain carved more deeply into her face than ever, tears running down her eyes.
He dropped like a stone. Never knew what hit him. The nano she’d painted him with on the first day they met, when she rubbed his hand at CRISPR CRAZE, long since migrated to his brain, causing the aneurism.
“For what it’s worth, Cristo, you showed me a future I’d much rather live in, not just this time, but every time. In each of your roleplays and the different creations the characters gave rise to. Each one of the alternate futures was so much better than the one we’re heading for.”
She wiped the tears from her eyes and dialed Sabrina, choosing to use the secure cell phone rather than her mindchip. She didn’t even want to admit she belonged to the worst of all possible futures ri
ght now. “Playing nice just doesn’t work, Sabrina.”
“Yeah, you aren’t the first to report in with the same message. I’ve recalled the other girls. You may as well come home too. Time to sacrifice some pawns while I protect my major pieces for the real battle to come.”
***
Roman bolted up in bed. Sweating profusely.
Hatter came running into his yurt, throwing the door wide open so hard it banged close behind him. “What the hell?”
Say one thing for Hatter, he took his twenty-four-seven surveillance of Roman very seriously.
Roman didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know if he could still speak. Finally, tired looking at the even mangier-looking Hatter than usual, now that he was half undressed, in nothing but his dirty long-johns, frozen in a pose of abject worry, he said, “It’s started. The first of us has fallen. The war you all insisted was coming and I refused to believe in is upon us.”
ACT 2
GUARDIANS AT THE GATE
ELEVEN
A chant from the chorus of “First blood! First blood!” rose towards Roman like the stinky exhaust of a misfiring car. The outcries were accompanied by equally zealous fist pumps to the sky. The barn was packed; everyone was here after Hatter put the word out that one of their own had fallen, one Cristo Balastar, to be precise. No small piece on the chessboard.
Roman had been trying to settle the crowd for a while and getting nowhere. He sat on stage warily eying them, waiting for the ruckus to die down, wondering what he was going to say to regain control of this mob. Fingers to his lips and a loud whistle was the latest effort to reclaim the silence; it too gained him no foothold.
“Guys, let him talk.” The words had escaped Elsa’s lips, uttered in a voice that couldn’t possibly have carried. The result was nonetheless dead silence.
Roman sighed. “Thank you.” Another beat to study the faces, looking for any in. “I get the pain of the injustice, I do. Cristo was a dear friend on top of everything. And one of the brighter lights in the darkness. You want to give them a taste of what they gave you?”
The crowd exploded again. He may as well have been calling for an “Amen!” at the end of a Baptist preacher’s prophecies. Again he waited for the crowd to settle, this time with a hiss from Elsa.
“Here’s the problem with that. Making war is what they’re good at. It’s not what we’re good at. It would be tantamount to surrendering the home court advantage. Play the game by their rules and we will lose.”
“But you want us to fight, right?” came a voice in the throng.
“Yes, I do. But not in the way you think. We need to pick a battlefield that’s undefended. Play a game they don’t even know is being played. While they’re busy oppressing, we need to be busy empowering. While they’re busy rounding us up for interrogations, tortures, and trying to get us to surrender our true calling, betray one another and our fellow biohackers across the world, we need to be where they’re not looking.”
“Hey, Roman can speak in code even us biohackers can’t crack,” said one of his hecklers. The crowd laughed and jeered. The comment was followed by a “speak clearly, Roman,” comment from somewhere else in the crowd.
“They’re going to be mobilizing their pawns in an effort to draw us out, suss out our weaknesses, expose our bishops, knights, castles, king, and queen. Their real target will be our bigger pieces, figuring we won’t stand idly by while our pawns are wiped off the field. If we let ourselves get played, once they know our true identities, they can move their bigger pieces into play and take us out handily. They’ll know how we think by then, our patterns of engagement, our fighting style. They’ll know everything. Above all, we can never succumb to their rhetoric. These people play psy-ops games even better than they blow things up and make people disappear. From their perspective, if they win the enemy’s hearts and minds, they don’t even have to fire a shot.
“But we’re too smart for that, right?”
“Damn right!” echoed through the throng.
“The same way I build you up with my visions of things to come, by getting you to believe in a future worth living in that emancipates us all, not just the one percent at the top as lords and the rest of us as their cattle… well, that mission, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to take to the world, you and I together. If you’re going to be my disciples, you have to figure out how to get out the word in ways that even I can’t. That’ll be all the more important if they do get to me, so you don’t become dispirited.”
“Once again, Roman, plain English, please,” one of the voices in the crowd shouted.
“There are writers among us. Time to stop shoveling out dystopian sci-fi crap and zombie apocalypses just because it’s popular and speaks to this End Times sentiment. The stories coincide so well with ninety-nine percent of the people of the earth being driven each day to homelessness, while the top one percent vacuum up more and more of our life’s earnings. Time to write about a future that we want to escape to, not from. But you’re going to have to do more than speak the gospel of Roman in the form of sci-fi novels and future forecasting; you’re going to have to convince the other writers around the world that it’s a project worth undertaking.”
“I’m thrilled you think people actually read anymore. As pathetic countermeasures go, that ranks pretty high up there,” Elsa said coldly. Her voice and her presence carrying from the center of the orchestra section a few rows back.
“Not just writers. Painters. Filmmakers. Videographers and photographers. Video game designers. Marketing and PR people. It’s a media age so you have to fight the battle there. And the media that’s most decentralized, the internet, that we own, not the powers that be who still rely on their newspapers, magazines, and TV stations to spew their vile lies about the state of the world.”
“Okay, fine, say we do all that, what next?” one of the voices in the throng said.
“No, not what next. These campaigns will be waged simultaneously. Say you make some ‘build it and they will come’ two-minute video for Facebook. And it shows this flying car taking off from this multi-million dollar dream house. And the aircar takes you to your job where you’re factory farming exotic vegetables, say a sweet potato so nutritionally dense it can provide a person everything they need for several days. Some of the viewers will catch the fever without you having to do anymore and will start to design the nextgen materials to make the flying car and the house possible so that not just the rich can afford it, but anybody, and the nextgen agronomics to make the super-vegetables. But most of the people who can catch the fever are already among the one percent. Yeah, that’s right, they’re not all bad; some of them are actually working in tandem with us. But the real bottleneck is…”
“Not enough smart people. Not enough chipheads,” said a voice in the audience.
“See,” Roman said cheekily, “with enough repetition stuff sinks into the densest of minds.” He got some soft chuckles. “So that’s where we come in. Human upgraders extraordinaire. We’ve got to figure out how to take our game to the next level so we can get everyone to the next level. The means the tech has to be safer, less threatening, more empowering, cheaper…”
“I think I might be able to help there,” Orion said. “When Cristo died, his mindchip didn’t shut down. I was able to data mine it for some pretty juicy information before the body and the chip were destroyed. “If you wouldn’t mind giving me the stage?”
“What about my Christ complex?”
“Having factored that in, I assure you I’ll be brief.”
Roman smiled and surrendered the stage to him.
The first thing Orion did was lower the movie screen. “Prepare yourselves,” he said, giving the crowd a “please forgive me” look before continuing. Then he pressed the remote.
Visible on screen were Cristo’s last moments, playing James Bond, against his female nemesis. But she was the real star of the show. Absorbing bullets, then healing herself. Then deflecting bullets. Then
surviving a flying tackle out a window and over a cliff. Only to rise up, not like a Phoenix, though that too, so much as Supergirl. There had been a series of gasps as the crowd followed the high-def video footage.
“Cristo’s mindchip had been recently tweaked to read the EMF transmissions from her brain,” the giant, Orion, explained in his customary booming voice that carried to the back row better than a trained theater actor. “That’s what first alerted him to her subterfuge. He never lived long enough to unravel the real present he’d been given. His mindchip wasn’t powerful enough to penetrate the security protocols around anything more than the most superficial layers of her mind to get to the prize under all the wrapping paper. Maybe if he’d lived long enough he could have…”
Roman tried to rescue Orion from falling into a pit of despair over his lost friend—he was closer to Cristo than most—by speaking up. “I gather you did manage to break through.”
“Yes,” Orion said, pulling out of it, his watery eyes focusing again. “Again, you may wish to prepare yourselves.” He pressed the remote to advance his PowerPoint presentation. “As it turns out, Svena, as she’s called, is the least powerful of the Magnificent Seven.” His slide showed the chorus line of cyberchicks with the queen bee at the center. They were standing in arrowhead formation with the queen at the tip of the arrowhead.
“Who’s the one at the center?” Roman asked.
“The most powerful of them all. She goes by the name of Sabrina.”
“They look like a bunch of dance hall singers dressed to make sure biohackers buy their label,” Roman said with a grimace.
“Yes, well, looks can be deceiving.” Orion advanced the slide. “These are some close-ups showing the science behind Svena’s magic.”
There were once again gasps throughout the audience. “Triple-stranded DNA?” “No way.” The ad-libbed comments erupted unbidden from separate places in the crowd.
Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents Page 10
