“It’s where they get their rapid morphing ability from,” Orion explained. “Allows them to mutate their structure on the fly to pull off the tricks we saw Svena do, and much more. There are limits to their rapid-evolving capacity, of course, which we’ll explain later, in greater depth. We’re just covering the big picture overview for today. Trust me, that’s enough to absorb.”
Orion advanced the slide show to the next video clip. “This is a more thoroughgoing tour of the inside of Sabrina’s brain.”
“How did you get from inside Svena’s brain to inside Sabrina’s?” Roman asked.
“We’ll cover that in the more detailed presentation,” Orion said in a tone that brooked no argument. “For now, please note the most salient point as regards how her mind works.”
Everyone in the audience was already working on those calculations. Whisperings were going on as they tried to explain to themselves and one another what they were looking at. Finally, Orion got impatient and groaned, rubbed his eyes. He blurted, “Her entire brain is a DNA super-computer!”
“Fuck me.” “Just not possible.” “Like hell you say.” “Not for another twenty years at least. Ten maybe, with enough funding on a global level.” The chorus was still throwing up their rebuttals when Orion chose to press on.
“What you need to understand,” Orion said, “is that our own unupgraded brains are essentially DNA computers. But nothing like this. The computational density of her mind is such that there is room in there for more computation than is possible with all the interlinked computers in the world currently.”
There were gasps followed by dead silence. And no one even able to breathe. Eyes had stopped blinking. Some hearts pounded so hard Roman could see the blood vessels pulsing in their necks. While other audience members were turning a shade of deathly white because their hearts had lost the will to contract.
“All right. I’ll ask the boneheaded question,” Roman said. “Why isn’t she running the world, then? Hell, the solar system.”
“Here’s a clip of her responding to an RPG blowing up in her face,” Orion said, showing the footage from Ethan’s latest attack on the oligarchs, which surprisingly hadn’t gone live yet. Either Ethan had decided the footage needed more editing, or…
Some of the crowd was now no longer standing in awe; they were collapsing back onto the hay bales, no longer able to stand, grown too weak in the knees, or just too faint. And these were the people who were supposed to be pioneering the future. Whose minds were thus the most open to it.
“I estimate Sabrina is using less than ten percent of her mind power to walk away from this little disaster,” Orion explained. “My guess is, until sufficient challenges arise, she just doesn’t power up any more than necessary, and so not even she knows what she can really do. I suspect it’s that way because once the secret is out, she may have no choice but to play Master of the Universe games as everyone else on the planet will be determined to do her in or usurp her throne seat. Like it or not, for now at least, she’s as incognito as the rest of us. Does that answer your question, Roman?”
Roman swallowed hard, but his mouth had gone dry; there was no spit to swallow. He too was now sitting on his butt and running his hands through his hair as if squeezing the oils out of it and getting it on his hands might actually help him to think, or stimulate extra circulation to his brain. “We need to get access to that technology, start working on ways to democratize it, lower the price of access.”
“That for our details presentation,” Orion said in the same authoritative tone he’d been using since he took the stage. “We’ll be discussing how to get to each of them, starting with the safes most easy to crack, the minds of the sexy six that follow her about and service their queen bee.”
He dropped the remote. “Let me sum up by saying, every member of the Magnificent Seven is triple-stranded DNA certified. Sabrina is just the first one to figure out how to parlay that into something even more extraordinary. For all we know, they all have this potential, and if the queen dies, one of the worker bees may well evolve to take her place. Much like the queen bee is supplied royal jelly in the hive so she can procure her wonders, they may well be able to parallel-array their minds briefly to concentrate on evolving one of them to the next level before succumbing to exhaustion or extinction. Of course, that’s all speculation for now.”
He turned away from the screen, still looping on Sabrina doing her back-from-the-dead trick following the RPG going off in her face during her stroll of the zeppelin’s catwalks. “Questions?”
There weren’t any. They were all too shell-shocked. “Glad to see Roman isn’t the only one who can leave you speechless.” He strode off the stage more worried looking than anyone in the crowd. He had the bigger mind, so it made sense he knew far more things that could go wrong with their little insurrection that the others hadn’t even gotten around to contemplating yet, and so he was entitled to worry more than the rest.
Roman took the stage again. “I’ll soak on what we will be able to do once we gain access to these technologies and start to work on democratizing them. A more positive future, after all, is my specialty.”
“Once, he says. Confident little bugger,” one of the hecklers in the audience ad libbed.
Roman chose to ignore him. “My brain trust will work on hacks and ways to get at the Magnificent Seven’s talents and abilities without them knowing they’ve been hacked. The rest of you can start thinking of ways to democratize the tech once we have it in hand. It’s a bit premature, I admit. Without the tech in hand, we won’t be working with all the information we need. Still, better going off half-cocked with our optimism than spiraling into defeatism, which I see is the path most of you have chosen for now. Go stew, people. We’re done here for now.”
The barn emptied, leaving just Elsa and Roman to regard one another waiting for the other to cave to the stare-down. Finally, Elsa said, “Sorry I was so hard on you.”
“That’s kind of your job, babe.” Roman debated downloading more of her past to her mind. Sooner or later he was going to need her particular gifts. She was a master criminal, after all, even if she couldn’t currently remember as much. And they were contemplating stealing into the minds of the Magnificent Seven, whose triple-stranded DNA makeup would probably make them the most inaccessible of safes in the world when it came to protecting their own secrets. He decided against proceeding with the download of most of the contents of Elsa’s mind for now. He’d wait to hear back from Orion and the rest of the mind trust on how well they were doing without her. If he didn’t need to sacrifice Elsa’s happiness, or at least any chance to escape her past, there was no point subjecting her to “the way she truly is.” For right now she was just an angry girl with a bad attitude, not someone who had committed so many sins and vile acts there was no forgiving herself or getting anyone else to forgive her. That was the destiny he was trying to spare all of them right now. War did that to people, turned them all into animals. Fighting for survival, for the scraps off the people. Starve enough people and divide and conquer games were unnecessary; the ninety-nine percent would turn on one another without provocation. No doubt why elements in the top one percent, currently in control of their government, specifically the oligarchs, or the top one percent of the top one percent, were keen on seeing everyone but them in a race to the bottom of the economic ladder.
“So, what’s my role in all this?” she said.
“For now, just continue to call me on my shit. We can’t afford to be done in right now by my idealism any more than by their cynicism. To play that role effectively, as the balance point of this little community, you’re going to have to learn to curb your own cynicism.”
“And you, your optimism.”
He grunted. “Not likely. It’s the only thing keeping me going. Some people have a family to live for that allows them to suffer tortures of the damned, to make a better life for their kids. Me, I just have the best of all possible futures, as Leibniz would
say. Still, to protect it at all costs, I will listen to critical feedback and integrate that thinking into my blind optimism.”
“You need to make mad passionate love to me?”
“You’re not mad, passionate, or loving.”
She smiled. “A wise man once said, fake it till you make it.”
“Good advice for demon spawn who dreams of being an angel someday.”
She smiled again, no less suggestively. “Keep talking like that and you’re going to talk your way out of the best lay of your life.”
“Stop, my right hand will get jealous.”
Moving like a cat, she uncoiled her legs, stretched and purred, and lunged toward him, kissing him, and then wrapping her legs around him, all in one seamless waterfall of motion. He wasn’t sure what had triggered this request for insta-passion; maybe she had just grown tired of his eyes constantly pleading for it every time he looked at her. Whatever had brought it on, he was not about to let the moment pass without capitalizing on it.
He walked her up the ladder to the loft above, no mean trick considering he was walking largely blind, and feeling his way across the barn and up the ladder.
She wasn’t just wrapped around him. She was undulating against him. A friend had draped a ten-foot Columbian red-tailed boa over his shoulder once. As it slithered over him, it massaged the tensions right out of his neck, shoulders, and back. He loved it. She was doing the snake one better. His deep breathing was flushing those tension-related toxins out of his body and making him expansive; the only other time he experienced these sensations was when he was doing his deep-breathing exercises when meditating. Breathy kisses were a bit more awkward than the breathless ones, but surely she could forgive him considering the athletic efforts required just to get them up to the loft.
As they crashed into the loose packed hay of the loft some feet from the ladder, he said, “I feel it only fair to tell you that making out on straw is like taking a thousand knives to the back, followed by another thousand. And, oh, yeah, you can bet every patch up here is more come-stained than a grease pit under a car at Jiffy Lube is covered with oil.”
“You sure know how to romance a girl,” she said breathlessly, in between her kisses, and pulling at his hair.
They took turns rolling over on top of one another as they disrobed, to give the one on top a chance to pull off their upper body garments. Then they rolled over on one another again to give the one on top the leverage to pull off the undergarments of the one below.
Note to self, Roman: Learn something about bras so you can seem like you know what you’re doing. Frustrated trying to get hers off, he decided to use the cups like ice-cream scoops instead to lift each breast up, one at a time, and suck on them. She laughed. All he could hope for was that it was dark enough up here to hide his crimson complexion, which he could feel, as he was getting so warm in the face.
She rescued him by undoing the snap herself. The rebounding elastic nearly took out his eyes and left him with pincer marks on each cheek as if possibly he’d been trying to get it on with a giant lobster—the one that attacked the earth in one of those 50s sci-fi films. He rubbed his “ouchies” and saw the blood on his hand. “Looks like Sabrina isn’t the only one intent on drawing first blood.”
They resumed their basting of one another’s tongues in each other’s saliva. He interrupted the tongue fucking briefly to ask a simple question. “Do you like a lot of foreplay, or do you like to just get to it?” Roman said, panting.
“Well, if you’re afraid of losing your erection, best we get to it.”
“Great, a challenge. Foreplay it is. As good a time as any to find out where all your erogenous zones are.”
“I have thirty-seven of them.”
“Good thing the night’s still young.”
Their quips were being interrupted by kisses and pants and acupuncture treatments with the hay stabbing their backs as they continued to roll over on one another. “Well, there was this one time,” she said, “when this guy so unlocked me that it was fair to say every cell in my body became an erogenous zone.”
“Oh, great, no performance anxiety here. No heightened expectations, none at all.”
She giggled. “Really, Roman, don’t set yourself up for failure like that. Just settle for a modest orgasm and build on that.”
“Now, you’re really going to get it.”
She laughed as he found a way to tickle her and unlock that first erogenous zone.
***
“Oh geez, what now? As if the bra debacle wasn’t enough?” Roman thought. He was just getting lost in her wetness, in the stranglehold her vagina had on his dick, now blocking out all the pinprick sensations of their bed of straw. When… When what? What the hell is this? It’s got to be the neuronet firing up again. Fuck me.
Every nerve in his body flared.
Just when he thought the fire would consume him, the frayed nerves calmed down. They started trafficking new information. Amplifying his earlier sensations, taking him beyond anything he could feel before.
His touch had become like a psychic sense. His fingers found their way to her erogenous zones as if they were calling to him. His brain secreted hormones they’d never secreted before, pushing him into a post-coital bliss that he’d only felt in the aftermath of one climax before. The euphoria continued heightening beyond what he’d ever felt climaxing. His dick would never have been able to take this kind of pressure before without shooting his load. Instead it grew stiffer and bigger.
His nerve endings stopped relaying stabbing sensations from the straw, dulling the inputs except for where they made contact with his pressure points, allowing them to contribute to the energy surge he felt through his entire body.
He could literally see his energy body lightning up, the chi channels unblocking, more and more energy coursing through the energy body’s conduits. His chakras where so many of these energy veins intersected, spun faster now. They had sounds associated with them he could hear in his head, almost like warp drive engines on a spaceship powering up. If his Star Trek references were worth a damn.
Was his body a kind of spaceship? Just awaiting its pilot to find the right buttons to flip?
He opened his eyes when he could no longer feel the straw at all. He was hovering above the bed of straw along with Elsa, the chakras along his spine somehow providing the antigravity effect. He tried not to freak out, keep his mind on his lovemaking. The science, if it was science, he’d figure out later. He could just be hallucinating on account of too much adrenaline forcing too many hormones into his system at once. None of it seemed real. Except for the ecstasy. Like nothing he’d felt before. As if that was the real gate opener into alternate realms.
***
“What the fuck?” Elsa could feel and see lightning flashes occurring inside her. Jumping from one nerve plexus to another. They were unbalancing her nervous system, creating hot flashes in places, tickling sensations in others.
She felt knots in her body undo and intense pressure there as if a masseuse’s strong hands were concentrating on that spot, while other parts of her felt gravity just fall off, as if she were floating in a pool.
She’d gone through several vintages of Roman’s spit with each round of kisses. He tasted at first like raspberry brandy. Note to self: Only date lushes from now on. The more she tried to get drunk on the taste, taking him in, dollop by dollop of saliva, the more she tasted his experiences, the episodes from his past that had left a lingering impression. They each had a taste associated with them, chemical triggers that sent wild hallucinations through her mind. Was she seeing those moments as they happened to him, or was she experiencing some form of synesthesia? The way some people see lights when they hear sounds, or smell things when they detect sound. Screw it. Must be some short in her mindchip. Something else for Hatter to take a look at. Whatever was causing the short, it was definitely rocking her world and maybe worth not fixing.
All the unevenness in her body settled dow
n. The wild, errant, contradictory sensations, like so much traffic noise that never came together musically. What replaced that chaos of sensations was something decidedly a lot more orchestrated.
The pressure sensations were now no longer felt in one place. But all over. And wherever they were felt, they gave way to her erogenous zones firing up. More pleasure, more sensation, passed through her, as if the notes that formed the keyboard that was her were no longer being trampled on by a cat walking across them but fingered by a maestro’s hands. Each time she traced the pressure points to its source, she found Roman’s fingers there. But how could this novice in the ways of love possibly know where they were on instinct alone? She herself could barely remember where they all were, it had been so long since anyone had released them.
Finally the noise in her head dialed down, the questioning, the seeking explanations, overcome by sensorial overload. She felt a protective bubble around the two of them. Knew that if anyone tried to violate it they would be thrown back. Like some kind of impenetrable force field.
Was she feeling her own aura? Had its character altered as a product of the lovemaking? Was it now more than a light show given off by a fired up energy body? The very energy body she used to snicker at every time someone mentioned Eastern energy medicine to her? That she could now feel so clearly she could correct the damn acupuncturist charts hanging on their walls?
The weirdest thing of all, the lovemaking itself seemed to open a portal. She wasn’t entirely convinced they were in the same time and space as they once were, and yet they were still clearly in the barn’s loft.
She dared open her eyes finally.
Holy shit! They were floating.
What. On. God’s. Earth. Had. Triggered. This? Some synergy between them? It couldn’t just be her practiced lovemaking; she was no newcomer to coital bliss. He may be a novice, but she certainly wasn’t. No faulty mindchip could do this.
Once again the questions faded away, blanketed in bliss. Whatever was causing this, she was beyond caring.
Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents Page 11
