Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents

by Dean C. Moore

  ***

  “You want to talk about what just happened?” he said, watching her get dressed in the darkness of the barn’s loft, illuminated only by starlight and moonlight filtering in through the skylights. Her back was to him dismissively, her face looking as if the whole time he was taking a tour of heaven she was watching The Exorcist in her head.

  “It was no big thing. Like degaussing one of those old-fashioned cathode-tube monitors. Just good to get the extra energy out of our systems,” she said, fastening her bra.

  “Really?” He wasn’t buying it. Then again, whatever had happened between them, he wasn’t sure he could handle it. And of the two of them, he was a lot more hot-wired for feeling good than she was.

  “Yeah, I guess not,” he said, deciding that playing it down wasn’t such a bad idea. He finished pulling up and zipping up his pants, and clambered down the ladder from the loft without even looking back.

  TWELVE

  Preston checked his reflection in the driver’s side window as he got out of the black, smoke-windowed beamer. Cinched down on the cravat and straightened his tie. He rather enjoyed the lines running along his face and neck, and his hands too, for that matter. The natty suit covered all the others. Not scars exactly. Not by a long shot. Both eyes were bionic, but the left eye did not have its true nature disguised. In the socket, a glowing red light shone from inside a metal sphere that rotated inside a black lens, as one might find on a designer pair of shades. The no-pretense eye was strictly for intimidation. As if the glowing blue-silver superconductive lines running over his body weren’t heart-stilling enough.

  The black curly hair and day-old beard and moustache complemented his roguish good looks, well-outside the realm of perfection for anything but supermodels. If anything, visible signs of artifice only added to his sex appeal. Who wanted reality these days?

  With a jarringly brusque turn he headed towards the family home of one Irvin Carlyle. Biohacker extraordinaire. Ten years old. The parents had no clue.

  The walkway was cracked. The English garden neglected. The house worn down. The paint as faded as the flowers. If there was a bright spot in this family’s life, it was Irvin, and he was about to take that away. The Carlyles would move on eventually. They all did.

  Preston rang the doorbell. He started fidgeting in his suit, straightening his cufflinks, making sure the sleeves of the jacket were just the right length over his shirt cuffs. It was the worn down presence of the house that did it; it was contrasting a little too curtly for comfort with his Sharper Image catalogue look.

  The sixteen-year-old sister answered the door and her jaw dropped. An entirely expected response. “I’m Irvin’s new tutor. The school hired me on their dime to help him bring his grades up.”

  “Yeah, sure, come on in.” She flung the door open wide and pressed herself up against him. “I mean that in every sense of the word.”

  He smiled at her, touched her chin. “We’ll have a little fun together when my session with Irvin is over. Your parents aren’t in so what they don’t know…”

  “…can bring me years of ecstasy in the reliving,” she said with a sigh.

  He was keeping her in a light state of hypnosis by massaging her brainwaves with his pulsing magnetic field, and by sending information from his bionic eyes straight into her brain through her pupils, overriding her natural neural circuitry. That might explain why she wasn’t totally freaked out right now by a cyborg standing in her living room.

  “Irvin?” he said, to jog her memory.

  “Oh, yeah, right, he’s that way,” she said pointing with the free hand that wasn’t curling her hair absently in an effort to make herself more alluring and to shorten the time he spent with Irvin.

  His bionic eyes were filming everything, had been since he left the car, as he made his way to Irvin’s bedroom.

  Once inside Preston closed the door behind him. “Who are you?” Irvin said, looking away from his Iron Man comic, prominently displayed on the big screen TV in his room, both pages showing on either side of the screen.

  Preston just smiled.

  “Oh, shit!” Irvin sat up straighter in bed, mostly in an effort to push as far away from him as possible. “You’re one of those cybernetic agents. You have your own alphabet soup agency, FRE, Fighting Rebellions Everywhere, which is kind of cool actually.” He reminded himself he was supposed to be scared. “Were it not for the fact that you guys make Darth Vader look good.” He swallowed hard. “And if you ask me, you’re more likely to start rebellions than snuff any out.” He gulped once again for good measure. “You’re here to hurt me, aren’t you?”

  Preston nodded. “I’m really cut up about it.”

  “No you’re not.”

  Preston shook his head. “No, I’m not.”

  Irvin yelled for his sister, “Amy!” at the top of his lungs.

  “I put her in a trance, I’m afraid.”

  “Really? That’s so cool.” He brought himself back on point again. “I mean, could you not hurt me? I’m actually kind of a genius. Maybe I can come work for you. I mean, that would be so cool.”

  “I’m taking to you, Irvin. If it were me, I’d be all for it. But you see, I’m not really here for you. You’re just a pawn I need to sacrifice to get to a bigger piece on the board.”

  “A pawn? Like you guys are pawns for… Oh, that’s right, I’m not supposed to know about them.”

  Preston smiled. “Don’t worry about it. You’re going to be in a coma from which you’ll never recover.”

  “Seriously? That sucks.” He lowered his eyes to his bedside picture of him and his family on vacation at Lake Tahoe. “Hey, wait!” he said, flicking his fingers. “I can get a lot of work done in a coma, so long as I maintain access to my hardware, my mindchip, and so on. You’d do that for me, won’t ya?”

  “Sure will, Irvin. The least I could do after I kill the rest of your family.”

  “Oh, man… That’s so wrong. I mean they’re clueless, but they don’t deserve that. Please, please, please, please, with sugar on top.”

  He smiled. “Good night, Irvin.” Preston beamed the information into his eyes, and he fell into a coma so fast, the least Preston could do was slide him down on the bed so he was in a more comfortable position, lying face up.

  Preston edited the footage in his head so the biohacker collectives wouldn’t know that Irvin was having a plum time in a coma and if anything would probably be pissed at being pulled out of it. They needed to feel a sense of urgency.

  He proceeded to the kitchen.

  The sixteen-year-old was fingering herself on the counter, apparently unable to keep her mind off him. An entirely expected reaction.

  He unzipped his fly, lifted her up at the waist and plowed her against the fridge. It took her a few seconds to open her eyes and realize she wasn’t dreaming this. She got so excited, she climaxed. It didn’t even slow her down. “Harder, harder!” she said breathlessly.

  Preston broke the trance with a pulse from his bionic eye. She got a load of his real façade and started screaming and wrestling to get off him. He just bound her arms and went on with his business. “The sensors in my prick can enjoy the tight virgin twat of yours in ways no normal male could. At least you know your sacrifice will not have been in vain.”

  He took her head in his hands and snapped her neck. He continued kissing and fucking her. “The only thing better than teen pussy, is dead pussy. The twat tightens during rigor mortis, did you know that? I sent a pulse to your brain so it would set in immediately.”

  He continued bobbing her up and down on his dick as he walked for the door and toward the car. Once in the car in the driver’s seat, he slid the seat back so she could continue to hump him savagely. This time assisted by another light pulse to her brain. The brain took six minutes to fully die, did she know that? That was going to be six minutes of the best sex they both ever had, with she enjoying it as much as him.

  The horn started blowing on the car and he
honestly didn’t even notice.

  But five minutes and forty-seconds into it, the parents did, as they parked their car and came walking up to his BMW. When they got a look at their teen daughter humping him like a pit bull that just wouldn’t let go of a bone, the mother started screaming, and the father yanked the door open. Pulled his daughter off him. She fell onto the grass lawn that extended straight to the road. He was cocking his fist to punch Preston in the face when he noticed his daughter was dead, her skin bleached white, her lips purple, her eyes milky.

  “You… you sick fuck! I’ll kill you!”

  Say one thing for the old man, the fact that he was outmatched was not going to deter him from getting his vengeance. “Will you stop stealing my best lines?” Preston said.

  After adjusting the frequency and intensity of the light output, he lasered the father into multiple sections with his bionic eye. The different parts of him slid off one another and onto the lawn. The head still screaming, “I’ll kill you!” even though he no longer had the lungs to produce the necessary sound.

  “I try not to kill people the same way twice,” he said turning to the wife. “I’m afraid you have quite the personal choice to make from a wide list of options.” He handed her the brochure from his inside jacket pocket.

  She glanced down at the menu, realizing he wasn’t kidding. Her mind in shock, she was probably looking for any excuse to escape the horror. Even if that meant reading from the list. But that didn’t last long. Crying, she ran down the street in her heels. He was embarrassed to admit she made quite the comical sight, trying to run in that tight skirt cut beneath the knees. He couldn’t help but laugh. That was so wrong of him.

  Finally, he just sighed. “Funny how many human responses there are to panic. I keep thinking I’ve seen them all.”

  Preston got back in the car and drove off slowly. He dialed the police via his mindchip. He didn’t need to move his mouth to speak to them; he let the chip handle the conversation, synthesizing his voice for him. “There’s a boy lying in a coma in his bed. The rest of the family has been slaughtered,” he said, driving over Mrs. Carlyle. Her body, acting as a speedbump, drove his head into the ceiling with a thud and mussed his hair. He combed his fingers through it to right himself. “1050 Paradise Lane. You can watch how it went down on the internet. Just check any biohacker in-box.” He cut the line. With the alert sent out, the pressure would be on the biohacker collectives from both ends, from their own people squirming to figure out what they had to do to get out from under FRE’s spotlight, and from the police.

  He didn’t think anyone would go so far as to rat on Roman Atman’s whereabouts, for however much they may grow to hate him for the kind of heat he was bringing to their kind. There were certain bonds among biohackers that couldn’t be broken. No, the more likely play was for one of the biohacker enclaves to try and rescue the boy from the hospital and from his coma using their biohacking tech. Most likely Roman Atman’s people. Guilt being the real glue that holds people together. And then Preston would have him.

  ***

  Roman tossed feverishly. Finally Elsa awoke to the commotion. She watched him wide-eyed for a while. Then she tried to shake him out of it, but she couldn’t drag him out of the dream. They had just been cuddling together since that first night of wild passionate lovemaking. Both using lame excuses for wanting to take it slow. No doubt he’d experienced something similar when they were making out, and was as afraid of going there again as she was. Maybe this was the price they were paying for that. Disturbed sleep. Or maybe this was something else.

  Then something strange happened. Lightning shot out of her, pulled right out of the stormy sky and channeled from heaven itself into him. Not one bolt but two. She sent him flying across the barn with the second lightning strike, to land halfway up the wall of the loft.

  That woke him.

  “That’s the first time that’s happened,” she said. She was already by his side, caressing his face. “I guess being a biohacker isn’t all it’s cracked up to be come time for a lightning strike. The first blast must have stopped your heart. The second must have started it again.” He slowly began to focus on her, believe where he was, orienting to time and place. “Do you remember what the dream was about?” she said.

  Breathlessly, he said, “Just what I predicted. The pawns have been mobilized. Another of us has fallen. They’re baiting us to make a wrong move, playing on our emotions.”

  “Judging from your face, I can see it’s working.”

  THIRTEEN

  The entire Daytona commune had gathered at Orion’s treehouse. It was the largest and most elaborate treehouse in the cooperative. The decks and levels wrapped around the grand old tree, and the staircases descended like a waterfall from the top, pooling and gathering at the deck areas at the given story, before descending via the staircase to the next level. Each deck was attached to a separate section of the house.

  With people crowded on every level, on the decks, and along the stairwell, Roman had to snake his way up with great effort. He felt as if he were fighting the crowd at a Comic Con. So many of their community had opted for biohacking in the way of body artists. There were horned devils with horns shooting out from their foreheads determined to pierce the skin. One guy had an exposed back with two-inch long needles running along his spine. There were people with skulls and faces popping out of their foreheads or their bellies or their backs or the upper parts of their hands from underneath the skin. There were tattoos of lewd women on some forearms and upper arms with their busts popping out in 3D. One guy had a shaved head with near ping-pong-sized balls running just under his skin in a crown formation. Add in the eyebrow piercings and the giant hoops in his ears, the red dreadlocks confined to the back of his otherwise shaved head and he was just one of several that belonged in some of your more choice sci-fi films. The only difference between these guys and those who were simply 3D body artists was their implants did double duty enhancing their minds and/or their five senses.

  No one made his passing particularly easy. He knew why they were here. Orion was the other “biggest of the big brains” in the commune, and after the attack on Irvin’s family, they were more interested in what he had to say than what Roman had to say.

  Orion was up top, at the highest level, gazing down from the deck at everyone looking up at him. As the wooden patios ringing the arboreal giant were wider at the bottom of the tree and narrowed as you ascended, it was possible for Orion to address the whole group. He just stood silently, staring at them, sipping his herb tea, more like moss-tea really, grown on the tree itself on which he lived. Orion had genetically altered the moss to produce mind expanding effects like LSD, but without any of the downfalls, such as leaving him to stare at a cow’s ass for eight hours thinking he was looking into the face of God. It acted more like cocaine to supercharge his level of alertness, or less prosaically, like the most power-boosted espresso coffee you ever had. No doubt it gave him another 50 IQ points to work with he wouldn’t ordinarily be able to access except in his most inspired moments.

  “Took you long enough to get here,” Orion grumbled, staring at the crowd, when Roman finally made it up top to his ivory tower, in fact made of redwood.

  “You tell them anything?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” he said, continuing to speak in a tone and at a level that would not carry to the listeners down below. “I leave crowd control to you. I’m a self-professed hermit, in case you forgot.” Orion’s salt and pepper hair was curly, and his beard thick, though only a few inches from his chin. He was a big burly, hairy, Sasquatch of a guy, though he wouldn’t have appreciated the analogy. Not exactly the oldest one in their community, but close. He had a musky odor that made him smell more an outgrowth of the forest than an outgrowth of humanity. His size usually didn’t impinge on Roman this much, but this was the first time he’d been pressed up this close to him in a long time. The fact that he towered nearly a foot over Roman wasn’t going to help
his sense of authority this day.

  The crowd, restless and mouthing off to one another in a constant din since Roman got here, was now fighting among themselves. The only thing minimizing the blows being exchanged was that it was hard to cock an elbow to deliver a punch in a crowd this densely packed, or cock a knee to drive to a groin for that matter.

  Roman whistled with his fingers in his mouth to get them to settle down. Zero effect. “A little help, buddy?”

  Orion’s voice was a deep baritone and smacked like thunder. “Quiet!” A gust of wind blew through the trees just then strong enough to push each of them back. It was as if it was just part of his exhale. Maybe the guy was a Sasquatch in another life; no one was this well timed to the forces of nature. His foot stomp had caused the tree to sway. In truth it was the gust of wind too that had done that, but the combined dramatic effect did the trick.

  “I told you they’d bait us,” Roman said, projecting his voice, standing beside Orion on the balcony.

  “There’s no way we’re letting that boy lie in a coma until his flesh withers off his bones,” one of his detractors shouted up from two levels below.

  “And what if he’s there that long?” Roman said. “What if it’s that long before we can do a damn thing about it without exposing ourselves and risking the entire lot of us, hell the entire movement? Then I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll build the technology to bring him back, better than before.” He regretted the last words leaving his lips as soon as they did; it made him sound like a commercial for The Six Million Dollar Man. Hopefully the TV series was too far back in time for anyone but an old movie buff like him to catch the reference. “But if we’re not around because we’re all in jail, then who’s going to reverse the effects the coma has had on him? The state of the art just isn’t there yet, and you know it. Not until we invent it. Which brings us back to our mission. To put the kind of superpowers each of us wields into the hands of the layman. So the fight for freedom is a war waged on so many fronts there’s no way for a centralized body of any kind to stop it.