Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents

by Dean C. Moore

  Elsa took a bite of her Duck l’Orange. “How did you know this was my favorite thing to order at a restaurant?” she said, attempting to play it casual, but he could sense that she was suspicious in the extreme. “I didn’t even know until you ordered it.”

  He hesitated, reaching for a plausible explanation, when he finally said, “You talk in your sleep.”

  “Huh. There must still be parts of my mind accessible only through an altered state. Maybe it’s a good sign that the amnesia is wearing off after the boating accident.”

  “Yeah, I think we should take it as a good sign, definitely,” he said grateful she was covering for him, but he sensed she was just letting the matter go for now out of respect for the moment.

  He nodded to the view of the mighty Columbia River, grateful that they’d gotten a table right up against the window wall at Salty’s. Between the sailboats and the yachts lit up at sunset… well, at least he was getting some help from the ambience. Right now he was thinking of it more as added distraction, but he’d take all the help he could get.

  “I want to walk along the shoreline come morning, hand in hand.”

  He smiled at her. “I think you’re a faster learner at this romance stuff than I am. Still, we don’t have to wait until morning. We can make it morning with our virtual reality overlays. Your mindchip can produce it, as can my neuronet. And better than any bionic eyes or smart-lenses.”

  “Yeah, but then we won’t get the experience of camping out on the beach by night.”

  “With rocks for a mattress, land crabs, seagulls pecking at us, and syringes floating ashore? We’ll need overlays for that too, and probably to light the fire, considering doing so for real is probably illegal around here.”

  “You’re right, you really do need a little more help with the romancing than I do,” she said, swallowing her food before talking and managing to eat without any gunk getting stuck in her front teeth. “That said, deal.”

  Later, the fire on the beach held them hypnotized for a while until it was easier just to lay back in one another’s arms and stare at the stars. “So, tell me more about the tech-infused future.”

  He chuckled and shifted his position to lie supine with his head in her lap. “Well, we might very well be looking up at floating cities, beloved by dragons that use them for nesting and a home base to return to.”

  She dreamily ran her fingers through the hair on his head with one hand as he talked, and pulled at what little hair he had on his chest with the other.

  “Telepods that are as omnipresent as telephone booths once were might make it easy for anyone to take a jaunt to the moon, to a planet or to an asteroid anywhere in the solar system as easily as we took a trip to the beach in the shadow of Salty’s this evening. No one would have to worry about access to the good life because everything would be created at virtually no cost, so the least of us can afford it. One gallon of paint could grow itself until it filled the entire house, change color on command, the nano infesting it cheaper than sand.”

  He sighed, absently scooping the gravely beach sand up in his hand and letting it slip between his fingers. “It sounds wild, but the one certainty no one can alter is the inexorable proliferation of nextgen technologies coincident with ever-dropping prices. You may have a carpet that grows and replenishes itself, while I have a tile floor that warms my feet, or examines my state of health from my shed skin cells, and a mirror on the wall that tells me I really am the most beautiful of them all and provides the necessary Google links to prove it.”

  She laughed at him.

  “I don’t think any two of us will live remotely alike, or even look remotely alike, maybe not even human,” he said. “I think the power of the technology will be that empowering in making us more who we uniquely are, and it will be available to one and all. Not an age of cheap Model T Fords everyone can afford, but off-the-shelf technology that can morph us into anything we, and only we desire. Sort of like each of us living in our own virtual world, only in the real world.”

  “Sounds heavenly.” She traced her fingernails in between the grooves of his ripped abs. “I just wish I could believe it. I suppose I do a little more each day. The more you talk of it.”

  “Oh, it’s no utopia,” he said, tossing a rock overhead as he lay with his head in her lap. “Our minds would rebel from that. We need challenges to grow as our minds grow.”

  “It’s not a utopia, I imagine, but you have to admit, that technology could level the playing field so much. I suppose rationally speaking, you’ve got history backing you up. But in our lifetime? Maybe in a hundred years.”

  He had slipped into right-brain dominance. He could tell because the constellations in the night sky were popping out at him, whereas before they were largely invisible. Taking advantage of the emergent big-picture potential, he said, “Kurzweil explained the accelerating rate of technology with a beautiful analogy. He says the future is always closer to us than we think. He said imagine you’re given a penny on day one, two pennies on day two, and each day it keeps doubling. How much money would you have at the end of the month? Some people imagine a few hundred dollars, some a few thousand. The answer is over a million.” He’d been tossing the rock into the air as he talked. The higher it got, the faster and harder it came down. It was starting to feel as if he were Sisyphus pushing that boulder uphill.

  She sighed. “You have a way of making rhetoric sound like logic. I hope you’re not taking us both in.”

  “Says the girl enjoying the warmth of a campfire, and plush feel of soft sand beneath her that really aren’t there, all courtesy of tech she cobbled together on the cheap using DIY methods. And even as we talk we’re working on giving even better tech to people without our skills. ‘The future is here and now’ is more than just a bumper sticker, baby.”

  She let him have the last word. He wasn’t entirely assuaged by that. He’d gotten the sense from day one of their relationship that she was playing a role as much for him as for herself. Faking it to make it. He hadn’t called her on it because wasn’t that what they were both doing? He pretending to be a lot smoother at this romance stuff than he actually was? She trying to be something other than a bad girl with bad habits?

  The walk along the river in the morning, a few hours short of actual morning, thanks to their overlays was everything it was billed as being in his head. But there remained this distance between them. The closer they got in some ways, the farther they were away from each other in other ways. Roman couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Maybe because so much of her mind remained off-limits to her, she could never be sure if she was being true to herself or not, or if the resurgent memories wouldn’t just wash away all the warm gushy feelings she was experiencing now. Even if that were the case, now was not the time for that download. Roman figured he’d know when the time was right. Now wasn’t it.

  A red light flashed before their eyes, overlaying everything, and a siren sounded in their ears. No doubt on account of another attack against the worldwide family of biohackers. Both of them shut down the alerts and gazed at one another. “How about we get back to the collective before we look into what it is?”

  He was glad for once he wasn’t the one begging to hold on to the moment. Maybe she wanted this new her to take as badly as he did.

  They drove back to the commune with her head in his lap, looking up at him and at the sky full of stars through the generous sunroof of his pickup truck. “I’m starting to think you’re right,” she said finally, breaking the silence. “I’m tired getting sucked back into their world, reacting like Pavlov’s dog every time they sound a bell. Your way is the right way.”

  “Let’s hope everyone else still feels that way by the time we get home.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Roman and Elsa got back to the Daytona commune pleased to see the camp wasn’t in a total uproar. There was no mass gathering at the barn, or at Orion’s place for that matter, about the only two places that could house a large congregatio
n.

  So they decided to go hobbit hutch by hobbit hutch. By now they’d played the footage from one of the biohacker sites in their mind’s eye by way of Elsa’s mindchip’s and Roman’s neuronet’s wireless internet access. They’d received clearance from Orion to do so, who had mastered how to cloak their transmissions and the fact that they had mind-enhancements from prying eyes and scanners. That had meant a chip upgrade for the others. As the Daytona collective itself was also shielded, as far as Elsa and Roman were concerned, they were free to receive the download once they were back on commune property.

  They found Anoki running scenario games in his hobbit hutch. Some were projected onto the monitors, others, the roof, the floor. When he ran out of makeshift screen space, he bounced the rest of the movies off a Disco-like mirror-ball hanging from the arched ceiling and twirling. The dome home had no end of panels to project upon thanks to the nature of geodesic domes and to the fact that Anoki used it as little more than a yurt, keeping the dome structure overhead and nothing more, no walls to break up projection access to the panels. The floor was dirt but carpeted like an Arabic tent with Persian rugs and scatter pillows. Anoki was Mideastern, even if he’d never specified which ever-feuding Arab country he was from exactly.

  “Where is everybody?” Roman asked.

  “Building your future for you.”

  “I’m guessing you had your hand in that. Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me.” Anoki was stretched out on his scatter pillows, a bong in hand the size of a sitar, which he was currently sucking on. “I’ve been running scenario games nonstop, featuring The Rockettes there,” he said, nodding to Sabrina and her entourage projected on more than a few screens. “My film library rivals MGM’s. And in none of the movies does it end well for us. Your strategy is the only thing that works. When the others wouldn’t believe me, I showed them what I’m showing you now. They filed out of here, one by one, with their tales between their legs, determined to resist in the only path left open to them with a chance in hell of success. No one was more disappointed than me.” As with Elsa’s impressive ability to eat while keeping gunk out of her front teeth, Anoki showed equal aplomb stuffing his lungs with ever more bong smoke without compromising his lecturing, even if he looked like a snorting dragon the whole time with smoke billowing out of his mouth and nose.

  “What if we break into two factions?” Elsa said.

  “Whaaaaat?” Roman glared at her looking thunderstruck and betrayed.

  “A war on two fronts,” Elsa continued, ignoring Roman, and talking only to Anoki. “Half our people working on Roman’s better world approach, the other half on sucking up enough of Sabrina’s resources that there’s that much less to counter the better world approach.”

  “Hmm,” Anoki said, scratching his chin, “might work.” Already the screens he was projecting on to were split, half telecasting efforts to build the new world right under The Magnificent Seven’s noses, the other half warring with them directly.

  “Anoki, you know we don’t have the resources needed to fight a war on two fronts,” Roman pleaded.

  “You’re forgetting about the wild card stirred into the deck. Ethan reached out to me. He has access to tech he thinks he can use to take down Sabrina. If so…”

  “The rest of them become a lot more vulnerable,” Elsa said, finishing Anoki’s thought for him. She averted her eyes and drew inward. “We might have another joker to stir into the deck.”

  “What?” Anoki sounded intrigued.

  She turned sharply to Roman. “Download the rest of my mind. I know you’re holding it hostage.”

  “How…?”

  “What did you think I was doing with my head in your lap and my eyes on the stars on the truck ride back home? I was rerunning the footage between us in my mind’s eye, checking your microexpressions and hesitations in response to some of my questions and statements. Your determination to make me over. The real me is something you detest, isn’t it? A warrior. Completely lethal. It’s the only thing that explains why a man of peace would do such a heinous thing as to violate another person’s very soul.”

  “You… you weren’t supposed to find out like this.”

  “When then? When you could minimize the damage to our budding relationship? Trust me, the longer I carried what I knew inside me the less chance there would be of that.”

  Roman stared at her helplessly. Afraid of his next words. “I won’t do it. I won’t allow us to split into two factions, either,” he said, turning to Anoki who had been running simulations the whole time factoring in now for the latest intel from Elsa. Roman could tell as much from the changing images projected on the many panels of the geodesic dome.

  “You’re the man. What you say goes,” Anoki said.

  “Why aren’t you giving me any pushback? That’s your job. You’re my brain-trust.”

  “Because I’ve run the scenarios,” he said, looking Roman square in the eye, “and it still doesn’t look good for us.” He set aside the bong and set about pouring absinthe for himself in a cocktail glass. “Maybe at some time in the future, when Elsa is fully on line and so are you. You yourself still don’t know what you can do with your neuronet. If it’s even entirely functional, or if firing it up to full capacity won’t just drive you mad like all the others.” He downed the absinthe. Poured another glass for himself. “We go off half-cocked now, we’re definitely done for.”

  He turned and glared at Elsa. “You heard him.”

  “What I heard is we need to start powering up from now, not that you have good reason for holding back on me.”

  “I have all kinds of good reasons, none of which Anoki can counter,” he practically shouted at her. The force behind their words had been escalating from the time she dropped that bomb on him. He turned his back on her and stomped toward the dome’s exit.

  “You walk out on me now and I swear to God we’ll see if you wake up from your sleep ever again.”

  He turned sharply to face her. “My, my, and you can’t wait to be even more you than you are now. You’ll forgive me if I take a pass on that.” And with that he was gone from the dome.

  She started to storm after him when Anoki said, “I wouldn’t.” His words and his tone stopped her dead in her tracks. The latest glass of absinthe hung suspended from his lips. “Your best move is to throw yourself into his make-peace-not-war campaign. If we all don’t give it everything we’ve got, convinced it’s bound to succeed, he won’t ever be able to accept that another path is better. Assuming another path is.” He downed the aromatic liqueur.

  She clenched her fist and stormed out of the dome. But this time she was heading not for Roman but for Orion. Maybe he could figure out how to free the part of her still stuck in Roman’s head.

  Finding her way up to Orion’s remote hideaway high up in the trees in the dark of the moonless night was not going to be possible without infrared assist, so she switched over to it on the EMF band. If anything, she felt closer to her true self. Apparently, whoever she was in that other life, she relied on night-vision a lot to carry out her missions. Special Ops soldier maybe?

  About ten minutes later she was standing looking over the shoulder of the seated giant. Orion had one of his arm bands off and was swapping out one of the flexible mindchips of his own design from underneath the sheath. Perhaps it was defective. Perhaps he’d made some improvements to the design. When he was finished, he wiped off the pinpricks of beaded blood on his arm with an alcohol swab, then slapped the arm band back on and swiveled away from his work station to take her in.

  In the darkness of his alcove, Elsa could see the light show taking place beneath the sheaths of the arm and leg bands and the vest. Orion was clearly teaching his brain to read the coded light signals, delivered much like low-level laser therapy, from the flexible chips; he wasn’t relying solely on electrical stimulation traveling from his pin-size probes directly into his nervous system.

  She brought her mind back on track.

&
nbsp; “Roman has captured my mind and won’t give it back,” she said maintaining the same forceful tone she’d been using back at the dome, powered by barely checked anger. I want you to get it back for me.”

  “Sorry, no can do, girlie.”

  “What are you talking about? There’s nothing you can’t do. It says so on your résumé.”

  “You’re talking going against the leader of our community. Not going to happen.”

  “Look, this is how it is…”

  “No, let me explain to you how it is.” He was firing up that authoritative tone of his own. “We survive as a community because we’ve learned over time who does what best. I’m no leader, and I’m certainly no visionary. Any move that suggests otherwise weakens us, doesn’t make us stronger. Now, I’m sorry to hear of what’s going on between you two but you’re going to have to settle it between yourselves.” He swiveled back to his work station, having put her out of his mind entirely.

  “But…”

  She suddenly realized nothing she was going to say was going to matter. And there was no point in trying to turn the entire community against either Orion or Roman using her influence, because there were a few people who trumped even her charisma. And she was staring at the back of one of them. Besides, Anoki would just come to their defenses with his, “I’ve run all scenarios to the contrary,” irrefutable arguments.

  She groaned and marched herself along the winding stairwells of Orion’s treehouse to the ground below, deciding what her next move was on the way down. By the time her feet hit terra-firma, she had an idea. Maybe it was time to pay Martha a call. The chick who surfed EMF waves like no other. Maybe there was more than one way to hack Roman’s mind. Just a pair of bad girls co-conspiring in a man’s world, what could be more normal than that?

  Elsa was starting to get the sinking feeling that the more she resisted Roman, the more she sunk into her old ways, and that might be enough for her memories to come back all on their own. It was arguably her best play. But was it? He might well be right. The real her might not be someone she cared to meet again.