Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents

by Dean C. Moore

  “I came to make up,” she said.

  He raised his eyes from the Rubik’s cube, studied her expression. “You mean you came to sweet talk me into giving you what you want now that you’re out of options. Playing nice and lovey-dovey just like you’ve been all along. Faking it to make it, wasn’t that your words? Have we ever shared anything that wasn’t play acting?”

  She took a deep breath and sighed it out. “No, not really. I had to get into character as your alter ego, the low to your high, the counterweight to that big mind of yours, all while being madly in love with you when most everything about you makes me sick. How else was I supposed to do it without stepping into character?” She had been answering his question while picking up knickknacks he had in his place—mockups of space stations still too advanced to actually build—turning them over in her hands about as distraitly as he was twisting that Rubik’s cube.

  “I don’t know why I’m so mad. I wanted you to play act until you could get comfortable inside someone’s skin who wasn’t evil incarnate. The question is what kind of actress are you? Did you get lost in character?”

  She met his eyes for the longest time. “I was getting there.” She set down the latest knickknack in her hand. It was a mockup of the Starship Enterprise. “Maybe if we had more time together.”

  He set down the Rubik’s cube on the mattress and launched himself at her. Got about half way there before stopping. “We still have time,” he said.

  ***

  The door tore off Roman’s yurt. He thought, maybe a strong wind? But his eyes quickly registered the pawn standing before him. The cybernetic agent had already wrapped his hands around Elsa’s waist. Lifted her off the ground in a hold she was not strong enough to break. The bastard had enough nerve to wink at Roman and smile.

  Roman had no choice now.

  He held out his hand and beamed the rest of her mind into Elsa’s noggin.

  And just like that, she was gone.

  The scream escaped Roman’s lips like a sonic blast directed at the cybernetic agent’s gut, meant to cut him in two. “Nooooooooo!”

  ***

  Elsa had gotten her mind back. Her reaction was not one of relief. It was one of horror. Roman was right to keep this from her. She really was a monster. The lowest of the low. She wasn’t sure this cybernetic creep that had his hands around her now was any worse.

  She knew she had what it took to shake him off. And a good many more just like him. She just didn’t have the will. She couldn’t go back to living like this. She wouldn’t. Better to die in his arms, or be tortured when he got her back to base. If they broke her, maybe they could rebuild her, better than she was before. Wasn’t that Roman’s promise? Their methods wouldn’t be so gentle, but a do-over was so clearly what she needed.

  ACT 3

  MAN OF PEACE NO MORE

  TWENTY

  A storm was coming.

  God bless Oregon. There was always a storm coming.

  It would provide Elsa with everything she needed to escape these goons that held her captive. If only she could find the will to do so.

  Okay, so she hated herself now that she knew the full extent of who she was. But surely, if she was willingly going to choose brainwashing, Roman’s methods would be superior to Sabrina’s. Could she hate herself that much to actually prefer Sabrina’s methods? To feel as if they were more what she deserved?

  Clearly the part of her brain still in control thought so. Because so far she couldn’t summon the will to resist despite herself.

  And she was running out of time.

  These cybernetic agents moved like lightning.

  That’s right, lightning.

  She smiled as she looked to the sky. The squiggly shafts of light were already coming to the ground to proclaim her re-birth.

  Knowing what she knew about herself now, maybe she wouldn’t have to break the impasse. A shaft of lightning would do it for her.

  Sure enough, one found its way to her third eye. The charge to the center of her forehead so great it threw her from the agent’s arms.

  When she finally pulled herself to standing again, the agent was still convulsing on the ground from the jolt of electricity. His clothes were all but fried. And from the glaze in his eyes, she’d say so was whatever passed for a brain in that thing.

  She took off at a run. Not back to camp. She couldn’t lead the pawns there. They would tear through the other Daytona residents to get to her.

  The whole time she was running all she could think was, “Why take me and not Roman? He was the high value target.”

  Shit, the agents are everywhere. Hundreds of them.

  You’re not going to dance between these raindrops, sister. Think fast.

  Elsa drew down a lightning bolt, let it levitate her off the ground, shooting out both the balls of her feet to the ground below. And she kept running on her improvised stilts. The whole time shooting lightning out the palms of her hands at her attackers. From her higher perch, she could see them coming at her from all directions. Had a clearer shot at them.

  She took them out wherever the beam impacted them.

  ***

  Preston, finished gyrating from taking the unexpected hit of electricity, the one that had freed the girl from his grip, stood and composed himself the best he could.

  He gazed down at his smoldering duds. “Shit! Not the Kilton Dark Blue Shadow Plaid suit at ten thousand dollars. That bitch is dead. Screw bringing her back alive.”

  He looked up at the sky and couldn’t believe what he was seeing. There was Elsa, running on lightning stilts and firing lightning out her palms. Feeding her was the lightning bolt that had touched her crown and failed to break off. She was controlling it somehow. Impossible. Not with dime-store tech some hacker wannabe cobbled together in her attic.

  Resuming the chase, he ran fast enough to reach the outskirts of her peripheral vision. Held his arm up when he took another hit. Repulsed it with his magnetic field. “Use your magnetic fields, you morons!” Preston yelled at the other pawns inside their heads by way of his mindchip’s receiver/transmitter.

  “Some of us haven’t figured out how to do that,” came the chorus of voices back at him.

  “Then the ones that haven’t, stop running, stand in place and shoot her out of the sky. The fact that she can shoot lightning out her ass doesn’t make her bulletproof.” Preston sighed. Some days he was ashamed to be related to any of them.

  “Screw taking potshots at her with my .45,” Z said. “I think my anger has risen to a point a bit past that.”

  ***

  Z pulled out the petite RPG strapped to the ridge of this back, where in days of old ninja strapped katana blades. The rocket launcher wasn’t much thicker than the sheath for one of those blades.

  He fired the weapon.

  To his delight, several other agents had taken his cue. “See, Preston, you aren’t the only one who can show some creative flair,” he mumbled to himself.

  The girl had over a dozen RPGs headed her way. “Try and escape that, bitch!”

  He gulped as he saw the girl’s reaction. “Shit, maybe firing those rockets at her wasn’t the best idea.”

  The girl had taken to flying on those lightning bursts instead of running on them. She’d aimed her palms behind her and spread her arms out like wings. She used the propulsive force of the lightning bolt hitting her in the head and channeled through four “jet thrusters” now to swoop down and redirect the RPGs at the clones.

  The rockets impacted the ground hard enough to take out over a dozen pawns at a time. By the time the dozen RPG shells had exploded, they were down nearly a hundred agents. Thankfully, there were hundreds more to spare. But still, he was going to have to explain this dunderheaded move to Preston eventually, and he really wasn’t looking forward to that conversation, and likely the trash-compacting, recycling machine to follow.

  ***

  Preston picked himself off the ground for the second time in as many minutes
. Pulled the shrapnel out of his face that had lodged there as he rode the periphery of the impact wave from the exploding RPG. “I hate to admit it, but the girl’s got game.”

  He glanced down at his socks. His shoes had blown off and what were left of his socks was hanging on by a blackened thread. “Not the Falke socks! The rare wool is the lightest, softest fabric in the world. Selfridges sells them for four hundred and ninety-five pounds a pair! What’s wrong with this woman? She’s just not right in the head, I tell you.”

  He’d made the mistake of talking over the party line. “Screw the socks. What about the cufflinks?” “You know what my tie costs? It’s handwoven by lepers.”

  “Oh, shut up!” Preston blasted. He gazed up at the sky. “She’s not running on lightning power anymore. My guess is she shot her wad and now she’s lying helpless somewhere. No one gets to tear her apart but me, you hear me?! Now find her!”

  ***

  Sabrina and her six sisters watched Elsa fleeing the pawns on their big screen. They were tapping the bionic eyes of the pawns for the footage.

  “And I was so getting used to The Magnificent Seven as a moniker,” Sabrina said with a smile.

  The other girls giggled. “The Electric Eight,” one of them suggested.

  “The Ecstatic Eight,” another intoned.

  “The Erotic Eight,” another insisted.

  “The Endless Eponymous Egregious Eight.”

  “Enough, girls,” Sabrina commanded. “You’re talking over my movie. Someone get the popcorn.”

  ***

  Preston pushed his way past the circle of agents surrounding Elsa’s body, her back leaned against a tree. Elsa’s hardware was showing just beneath her skin for the first time. She certainly hadn’t been stingy about the augmentations. The lightning surges must have taken some of the flexibility out of the otherwise unnoticeable sub-dermal plates. That, or they popped to the surface to avoid damaging her body when becoming overheated. With the disks of different sizes covering nearly every inch of her she looked sufficiently alien for her own intergalactic comic book line.

  “Jesus, she’s fried,” Preston said, stooping down to press an eyelid open on the limp girl’s body. His mind scan detected all implants were inactive, and her brain swelled to the point where the sutures in her skull had begun to separate like an over-poached egg.

  He stood, sighing. “Someone pick her up and get her back to Sabrina. If anybody can do anything with her, it’s her.”

  There was never any hesitation with responding to his commands. That’s what caused him to look away from the girl. The other agents were struggling to regain their senses. Staggering. Mumbling meaninglessly. Falling over.

  He sniffed the air. “Some kind of static electricity permeating the air at high concentrations. So, our little girl is playing possum.” He stooped back down. “If you don’t stop it right now I will peel you open like a grape and pull every superconducting wire out of you one by one.”

  Preston gave her a few seconds to process that. Then screamed as he jumped back, jamming his palm into his forehead. “What the fuck?” He staggered away from her, realizing the farther away he got, the better he felt. He broadcasted to the other agents to do the same. But they were too far gone. Assuming his broadcast could penetrate the shield of static electricity.

  Nearly half a mile out Preston could feel his faculties returning and his body wanting to do something besides explode. Damn it! If her equivalent of an EMP pulse radiated this far out, the other agents would all be down.

  He got on the COM to Sabrina by tapping his temple with his forefinger. “She eluded us,” was all he said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Sabrina replied without emotion. “She’ll come to us. Where else can she go?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “The girl is desperate to remake herself. Roman’s methods are too slow, mine a good deal faster. And she hates herself too much now to accept love from anyone. Roman is suddenly a lot less attractive alternative.”

  Preston signed off with a snort, thinking, “Couldn’t we have gotten that fax earlier?”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Roman stared at the Rubik’s cube in his hand. The stupid little toy he’d spent the last few hours turning in his hands when he could have damn well spent the time with Elsa, no matter how mad he was at her. He might never see her again and now his time with her when she was here was all they had.

  In anger he tried to squeeze the life out of the Rubik’s cube. Ended up crushing it. He had no idea how hard it was to crush one of those things. Certainly not too hard, right?

  He exited the tent looking for the others. The first person he ran into was Anoki. “Where is everyone?” Roman asked.

  “Out scavenging blown up cybernetic agent parts.” Anoki huffed. “Probably not the brightest idea. At least one scenario suggests that the body segments would double as land mines in case they fell into enemy hands. Another that they would be implanted with listening and other surveillance devices for gathering intel from the enemy prior to exploding.”

  “I can’t stand here and ponder alternate realities with you, Anoki. I’m having enough trouble processing this one. I need to find Hatter.”

  “He’s probably where he usually is, performing surgery.”

  “We have people getting implants now, after an all-out attack by cybernetic agents?”

  “When better? They’re tooling up.”

  Martha ran up to them. “Did you know your girl could ride lightning?! I saw it all from my tree top. Quite the show she put on. She took out two hundred agents single-handed. There are like another couple hundred lying around dazed and confused. No one’s entirely clear if they’ll be a hundred percent again. Their own people won’t even collect them. The victims are staggering around the forest like a bunch of Gulf War vets with PTSD.”

  “Is what she saying true?” Melville, the community’s resident Frankenstein monster, said, overhearing. He’d been walking by when his gait faltered. “Shit, we could use some help around here, chopping firewood, building homes. If they’re not at a hundred percent, all the better. How smart do you have to be to chop firewood? Maybe some of them could be turned as spies, made to work for us. Some of them might have been far enough away from whatever it is she sicced on them to have suffered less damage. I’ll get some of the others on it,” he said, before rushing off.

  Orion found their little group. “Well, fearless leader, what do you plan to do about this?”

  “According to Anoki, we need to split into two groups, one to carry out my bright-future agenda, the other one to deal with the dark-present.”

  “What I said was,” Anoki interrupted, “that at some point in the future when…”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Roman said. “What do you think I want to see Hatter about? Something tells me my neuronet has been less dormant than I was led to believe.”

  “What makes you say that?” Orion asked.

  Roman really didn’t want to recant his night of passionate lovemaking with Elsa for them or the strange effects that accompanied it. He had tried to keep the thoughts out of his own mind this long; he couldn’t imagine siccing them on someone else. That, and well, the whole thing was a bit personal. “Let’s just say there have been signs hard to attribute to anything else.”

  He hiked off in the direction of Hacker’s surgical theater, the animal barn, as opposed to the barn where they watched their movies and had their town hall meetings.

  “What did you tell him exactly?” Orion asked.

  “That splintering into a wartime and peacetime division might work, provided his neuronet had evolved him enough, and that we were networked with Ethan, who of all of us, would probably know best how to take down The Magnificent Seven.”

  Orion glared at Anoki. “You better let me check your chip, make sure it hasn’t fried your brain, you jackass!”

  Anoki lowered his eyes in shame. “Well, I did say the odds were still long. I just didn’t give them preci
se numbers. Didn’t want to rob the kids of all hope for a brighter future.”

  “What did Roman say?”

  “He said that keeping everyone working on building a better future right under their noses was our best way forward. He shut Elsa’s idea down pretty quick. Of course, that was then, before they stole his girlfriend.”

  “He’s no wartime conciliar,” Orion shout-whispered in that baritone voice that brooked no argument. “If he chooses to point any of us their direction, we’re all dead.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” Anoki said. “At least a few promising scenarios suggest that the neuronet will make him a better man of war than he ever was a man of peace.”

  “What the hell makes you say that?” Orion said, speaking just as forcefully as before.

  “The neuronet’s job is to be strongest where he’s weakest. Where would a man of peace be weakest? The only difference is, it works at light speed, and dialogues with the deepest recesses of his unconscious mind, where it is believed quantum dynamics play a significant role. If he has access to the quantum realm…”

  Orion’s eyes went wide. He nodded, pulling at his beard and putting two and two together. “That could be more than a match for Sabrina’s DNA-computer brain. Just one problem with your scenario, scenario-maker.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

  “The quantum realm doesn’t just deal with one reality, it deals with them all. No telling if the timeline Roman triumphs in is the one we inhabit.”

  Anoki gulped. “Yeah, there’s that.”

  Orion stormed off in the direction of his treehouse, no doubt to work on bolstering Roman’s wartime efforts as much as his peacetime efforts. In Roman’s absence, he’d be coordinating both groups.