Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents

by Dean C. Moore

  ***

  Svena had taken the security team off-guard. The sight of her caused them to hesitate despite their training. Maybe it was the fact she was carrying no gun and dressed more like the entertainment. Maybe it was the “collagen lips, generous forehead and nutcracker thighs,” she thought cheekily, reminded of Preston’s notetaking. Standing by each door, they finally raised their assault rifles at her and fired. Maybe it was the goosebumps rising on their skin with each step she took towards them that was the real game changer.

  She morphed her surface layers to deflect the bullets, turning them into miniature boomerangs headed right back to the senders. Most of the guards had fallen before the last one caught on to what was going on.

  He ran down to the next level, found the junction box, flipped the switches to take out the lights, then thought better about what he was doing and shot up the junction box. The team inside came equipped with night-vision goggles. He’d evidently assumed she hadn’t because she wasn’t wearing any. He hadn’t factored in for smart contacts or any number of other workarounds. In her case, her triple-stranded DNA had mutated her eyes to allow her to see along virtually any band of the EMF spectrum.

  The guards on the floor below came at her, dropping down from the roof above, or broadsiding her every time she passed a room. One was lying on the floor aiming his rifle up at her. They evidently weren’t relying on darkness alone to foil her. It didn’t really matter. If they made the mistake of touching her, her skin nano started a catalytic reaction that burned like hell on the surface and consumed them from the outside-in within seconds. They desiccated faster than the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz.

  Svena hacked the assault weapons belonging to the ones determined to keep a safe distance and fire at her so the guns blew up in their faces instead. The rifles were AI-enabled mostly to alert their owners what parts needed servicing when and to correct their aim when in automatic fire mode. That wasn’t to say they couldn’t handle other directives. When her latest countermeasures prompted the remaining number to go Ninja on her, reaching for knives and shuriken, she had her skin nano magnetically repel them. The effect wasn’t as prominent as what the pawns could do, but it was enough to neutralize the weapons. She yanked them out of the walls or the furniture, wherever they landed, and flung them back to take out the last remaining attackers.

  The next floor down, Svena hit pay dirt. The Ugandan President, in nothing but his boxer shorts, had been pulled off one of the women he was raping. He was surrounded by his top henchmen, and was being escorted out of the building. His posse dared Svena to try anything this close in to so many civilian women waiting their turn to be savaged, who’d already been victimized, only to be subjected to friendly and unfriendly fire alike. The soldiers were also body-armored to the teeth, so deflecting bullets and lasers back at them wasn’t going to do much.

  As Roman had been looped in the entire time, he told her to stand down. He’d take it from here.

  She switched her focus to the screaming, sobbing, hysterical females running the gamut from seven to seventeen years of age. Not one of-age girl in the lot. Not that rape was all that much more excusable at any age.

  Svena exhaled as she might on a cold winter morning, sending a fog of nanites into the air to multiply and saturate the room, so the ladies would have no choice but to breathe it in. The nanomist calmed them immediately, flushed the fear out of their systems, rebalanced their hormones and jacked the strategic centers of their brains. She was hoping they’d use their newfound smarts to enact their revenge on their persecutors, save her and the rest of the Sexy Six a lot of tedious mop up work chasing down every last corrupt bastard in the country.

  But it was not to be so. As soon as the women no longer felt victimized, they were able to better access their DNA-computer-based neuro-nets, stretching over their brains like another layer of dura mater, which someone had managed to instill them with. “This is Ethan’s handiwork,” she heard Roman say in her head. If the women were feeling pressured, it was to get on with their lives and their “missions from God” on how best to make their mark in the world, balancing the greater good with their own self-actualization. The whole metamorphosis was kind of creepy. Like stage actors cleaning up after themselves after the show was over and returning to their real lives.

  Svena was actually startled by the sunlight by the time she stepped outside the palace. They had arrived at high noon, so the sun shouldn’t have been any surprise to her. But the compound had had the windows shuttered, and with the lights off inside, it was like emerging from a dark cave.

  She was just in time for the show.

  The Ugandan President, stuffed into the back of his limo, driving off, was accompanied by an escort of cars providing cover to every side like a small fleet of ships protecting the aircraft carrier in the center.

  A rocket, sent from Sabrina’s plane on the roof of the compound, took out the entire pack of fleeing rats. It was a satisfying way to start the morning.

  The explosion awakened another sleeping guard that was supposed to be standing watch at the entrance of the palace. His chair was tilted back onto two legs as he rested his back against the wall, snoring. A half-smoked cigarette was stuck to his bottom lip. As he oriented to time and place, he tilted the chair forward onto four legs and was reaching for his gun when Preston exited the Palace and karate chopped his head off at the neck. As it rolled on the ground to a stop, Preston reached down and pulled the cigarette out of its mouth and puffed on the cancer stick himself. “Thanks for the relaxing smoke, pal. I could do with it.” He gazed up at Svena. “The bitch didn’t leave me one person to kill. Not one!”

  Preston joined Svena, standing by her side. “It’ll take me a week to get the smell of petrol out of this suit,” he said, taking in the conflagration.

  He threw his arm over her shoulders. “Hey, I was hoping you could help me with a little problem of my own. You see, I was a really bad man in my other life. Didn’t just kill people who deserved it. And I was really hoping for some magnanimous act to help balance the scales.”

  “Delousing Uganda of vermin like you doesn’t qualify?”

  He grimaced. “Definitely makes a dent.” He brushed off the smoldering ashes hitting him from the exploded vehicles with a fevered passion. “Christ, it’s a self-mending suit and I still can’t stop myself. OCD is a bitch, yes.” He looked back up at the billowing smoke. “Anyway, as I was saying, makes a dent, but hardly pays off the debt.”

  Svena was doing her best to ignore him, basking in the sense of victory over the recently dispatched Ugandan president, when railgun cannons, the kinds used on ultra-modern warships, rose out of the ground. They surrounded the compound at various distances, obviously meant to provide cover, anything from shooting down overflying planes to taking out advancing tanks. It was enough to repel an entire army, perhaps even one from another planet.

  The cannons had taken but a moment to swivel into position, aimed directly at the palace, and by extension, at her, instead of away from both.

  “Karma is a real bitch, yes,” Preston said. “Maybe now you can appreciate my sense of urgency to get ahead of it.”

  About all Svena’s superior triple-stranded DNA could do for her was take a breather. She sensed no morphing going on inside her to ready her for what was coming next. Which she could only translate as: Game Over.

  ***

  Vera, one of the Sexy Six, did something not very sexy. She hurtled a loogie into the town’s water supply. The nano would continue to multiply, determined to fulfill the mission for which they’d been encoded. Namely, to seek and destroy every antisocial personality type they ran into. Unless those folks had figured out how to sustain themselves without drinking water, their days were distinctly numbered. While Vera didn’t mind mass murder, she certainly wasn’t about to die from the sheer tedium of annihilating that many people. There would be other campaigns she’d be needed on soon enough, so she certainly couldn’t be bothered to be slowe
d by functions better handled by minions, electronic or otherwise. She was referring to her DNA-based nanobots acting as unstoppable retroviruses.

  She’d already made use of coopted flying cars, idling at the ready, with their taxi drivers looking for fares, to do the same with the major lakes, rivers, and municipal water supplies throughout the country. All it had taken was a kiss from her to send the taxi drivers on a new mission, to fly over and spit in the necessary water concourses in question. By the time they arrived at their targets, her retroviral nanobots would have replicated in them to the degree that their saliva was no less lethal. She could just as easily have ordered them with the brain reprogramming nano of her kiss to fly into the water supplies in a series of kamikaze dives, but where would the world be without taxis and taxi-drivers at the ready? Uber self-driving cars aside, she wasn’t about to fly against the decision of the locals to keep humans behind the wheel.

  Vera had already taken advantage of the prevailing winds to disperse nano clouds with the same mission. Either by air or by water, she estimated that within a few days at most, their assignment would have been carried out without further involvement from the girls. The nano infested air and water would likely saturate more than Uganda before the nano self-dissolved. Sort of like a kid painting a picture with crayons, the lines would be fudged, but the goal would be accomplished. And no one was going to mind a few less corrupt bastards in adjoining countries. Perhaps Roman had already calculated that with today’s experiment in social engineering, future heavy-handed interventions would be all that less necessary to get folks in line with the whole “’Tis more conducive to a long life to do good than to do evil” thing.

  She was feeling quite full of herself for masterminding her end of things without further instructions from above when she looked up from the water supply that had temporarily pulled her focus. There before her eyes was a sky filled with hovering black droid spheres. Essentially micro-satellites that were kept in low-earth orbit and called in for missions like today. No two hackable in entirely the same way. All wielding different death-dealing implements in case the other side had countermeasures for any one of them in place. Each of the microsatellites was working with jacked up nervous systems faster than hers.

  When they refused to take their attention off her, Vera thought, “Maybe it’s the strong chin, ridiculous eye lashes, and ears that flush red for no reason.” She was woe to admit it, but Preston’s remarks had left her even more devastated than her present situation.

  Whoever this Ugandan President was, he was definitely on someone’s payroll, and that someone didn’t particularly like their master plans being messed with.

  The best her triple-stranded DNA could do for her under the circumstances was shut down. She could feel the third strand going dormant. A reaction that could really only be translated one way: “Surrender!” To which she snorted, “Not likely.”

  ***

  Darya, one of the Sexy Six, was standing in the control room of the Ugandan national broadcasting studio, the UBC, for short. Despite the UBC’s best efforts, televising news with the intent of maximizing fear had seen its heyday. No longer was it easy to propel the populace towards allowing the authorities to usurp more and more power and freedoms from the common man in the name of “keeping everyone safe.” Ever since the DNA neural nets had found their ways into peoples’ minds, a diminishing number could be swayed with psy-ops games away from their true callings in life, no matter how sophisticated the gamesmanship.

  Still, for those who were destined to be anti-social, the broadcasts maintained a certain appeal. Darya accepted the fact that her role here today was largely redundant. Her sisters would have devised any number of ploys to carry out Roman’s assignment that would meet with the same or greater success in less time. But redundancy was key in a world where the other side had just as many high-tech solutions for shutting you down as you had for keeping them in line.

  She had always enjoyed writing code, so she composed some “medleys.” Then, she morphed her finger into the shape of a HDMI-4 socket plug and stuck it in a slot of a networked computer. The broadcast, entirely digital, beamed across the internet to computer screens all over the country, to cell phones, and directly to mindchips for those that had them. Surprisingly, that was most everybody even in this backwards country. How better to keep people in line than to chip them and to make sure the chips were free to everybody? In other words, the vast network provided Darya with all the broadcast reach she needed.

  The coding drove anyone so inclined to do harm to themselves or to others into a complete psychotic break. Her subliminal images were just that good. It was Preston that had given her the idea with his hurtful remarks on the plane, reducing her to, “Larger bottom lip. Shiny black hair straight to a waterfall of curls. Pale blue eyes with mauve centers to match the lipstick.” If his words could do such damage, so could her subliminals. And for that matter, so could her “public service announcements.”

  Those on the receiving end of them were now forever lost in an Orwellian-like Big-Brother-on-Steroids world in which being paranoid lent the only real chance of survival. Suspecting that you were being watched twenty-four-seven, and evolving ways to double and triple and quadruple think around the mental surveillance so no one knew your true intent, was a must. But no matter how hard you worked to evade suspicion, the authorities always marked you as a traitor to the state, tracked you down, tortured you into submission… so the dramas played out in the heads of everyone susceptible to the news broadcasts coming from the National News Service.

  As far as Darya was concerned, she was just helping these antisocial types to evolve into all they could be, and all they could make of this world in less time. Allowing them to get everything they ever wished for.

  ***

  Musoga rubbed his hands together and paced his high-rise office. He couldn’t get his eyes off the hidden cameras, everywhere. In the eyes of the porcelain knickknacks he chose to decorate the room with. On his laptop. He’d only gotten a laptop to keep the voices out of his head which he was certain would be there if he’d gotten a mindchip. He’d taped over the camera on the laptop but was convinced it still wasn’t enough. That they’d improved the cameras to see past the black electrical tape somehow.

  When he ran out of things to throw over the spying eyes, he let out a scream of frustration. He just started turning the knickknacks around to face the other way, hoped their camera eyes wouldn’t catch any reflections. Meanwhile the many computer screens he used for his stock-market trades kept running broadcasts of new ways the government had to spy on you. Someone from Anonymous was lecturing the public on a different countermeasure for each of the new probes.

  It was then that Musoga remembered the spy sweeper in his desk drawer. He quickly got it out and scanned the room. He was turning up listening devices everywhere. The dust on the carpet wasn’t dust; they were miniscule listening devices. Same with the dandruff on his shoulder. The booger in his nose. He ran the vacuum over the carpet, emptied the vacuum cleaner bag in the garbage, and lit the lint on fire. He deposited the booger from his nose on top of the burning pile. Tried to dust as much of the dandruff on his shoulders off into the pyre that he could get to, to keep him from having to vacuum the floor all over again, but of course, that’s just what he had to do.

  He ran the spy sweeper over the room one more time. The annoying beeping and flashing lights were emanating from the scanning device as ferociously as before. He was sweating so profusely now, he could no longer keep the perspiration out of his eyes. His temperature was sufficiently elevated that he’d stripped his suit off him, down to his underwear.

  He ran the spy equipment over the suit; every shred of clothing was saturated with the same listening-lint. He threw the bundle of clothes into the fire in the waste basket, not paying particular attention to the fact that it was spreading beyond the basket. When he finally realized he was going to end up burning himself alive, and rushed for the fire extingu
isher in his office, it was too late. The fire had already been put out by the flame-retardant suit and carpet and lint. They were not going to let him burn his way to freedom!

  Panicked, his heart beating through his chest, he reached into another drawer. Pulled out the packet marked “Faraday Cage.” Unfolded the tent and erected it right there inside of the office. Crawled himself with his backpack right into it and zipped it up.

  Musoga was breathing easier now. He was going to survive this. Try and get him, will they? Ha! That’ll be the day.

  He took his Bunsen burner out of his backpack and his Boy Scout cooking kit and started preparing a calming pot of oatmeal for himself. Comfort food would get him through this as it had done many times before. Get him calm enough so he could think, come up with a rational plan for getting around Big Brother one more day.

  It wasn’t long before the fire from the Bunsen burner was throwing up shadows on the tent walls. Shadows in the forms of faces. They weren’t benign faces. They looked hostile and disapproving in the extreme. The faces forged by nano swarms? A Nano-infested Faraday cage? Who’d ever heard of such a thing? Maybe he’d left it in the drawer too long, and it had spoiled. The plastic bag it was sealed in had failed to keep out self-evolving spyware sent to search out holes in the net around him and fill them. “Damn it!” How could he have been so careless?

  He needed room in his head to think, God damn it! Away from these prying eyes. He took the aluminum spoon from his Boy Scout kit and scooped out one eye and then the other, blindly stirred them into the pot of oatmeal on the Bunsen burner. He was not concerned about his screams escaping the room; it was soundproofed. The physical pain he was now in, furthermore, was nothing like the psychological pain he was working fastidiously to address.