Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents

by Dean C. Moore

  He took his Swiss army knife and dug out his ear canals next, threw them in the oatmeal as well. He could feel himself hollering by the force of outgoing air against his throat and mouth. But he could no longer hear his screams.

  Now at least he’d have some peace of mind. Some place where he could think uninterrupted, away from the prying eyes and nagging nano-cloud voices. Now at least he stood some chance of figuring a way out of this latest mess.

  But the voices came into his head anyway, unbidden. The images too. Of course, the nano had hacked his mind! Did he really think they were just going to hang on to the inside surface of his tent and keep an eye on him? They had to know what he was thinking and imagining, just like he did.

  Well, he wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction. No, siree. He cut a hole in the carpet, exposing the cement floor, and proceeded to bash his head in before the self-healing carpet could mend itself and close this avenue off to him. All he needed was time enough to rupture the sagittal sutures in his skull that had sealed with age. That mission accomplished, he took the Swiss Army knife, cutting where he felt the cracks along his skull, then peeled back his scalp. Then he flaked away his skull cap like an egg shell.

  His brain exposed, the rest was easy. He just had to sever the communication channels to the parts of his brain that could conjure sounds and images even in the absence of an auditory canal and a pair of eyes. He was no neurosurgeon, and inside the Faraday cage he certainly couldn’t pull down what he needed from the internet. That left one option. Trial and error. He went at it, content in the realization that sooner or later he’d be deaf and blind again. He’d sink forever quietly into that void, feel the peace of a Buddhist monk. And in that wide open space would be all the room he needed to have unpolluted, unpressured, uncharacteristic thoughts.

  The void came upon him after a while. And it was everything he’d hoped for. Only what was he doing here? How was he supposed to get back out again? He really couldn’t summon any intellectual faculties to make sense of it. There was just this inescapable sense of awareness. Of feeling as if someone was watching. He was convinced that someone was him, though that was little more than a vague sense. It was only then that he realized they finally had him. They’d turned him into one of them, no more than a watchful eye.

  ***

  Darya smiled with a smug sense of satisfaction as she pulled her finger out of the HDMI-4 socket. She was briefly distracted watching her finger morph back into its original shape. That’s why she missed the beat change.

  The floor giving way under her and creating a wooziness in her stomach managed to convey the importance of eternal vigilance well enough. If she was determined to be hard-headed on the matter, good, because the next thing that happened was she flew against a metal desk so hard, her noggin left a dent in it. The pain stabbed at the back of her head like a spike had been driven through it. She had to dial down her hearing; her ear drums were being bludgeoned to death by sounds of tearing metal and stones breaking against one another. Cement dust was pouring out of her mouth like moist breaths in snowy January. Her coughing contracted her abs faster and more regularly than a set of power sit-ups. She’d experienced enough to feel quite authoritative on the matter: cement dust tasted like the sticky side of sandpaper and smelled like stale baking flour.

  With the floor and walls moving, the studio’s interiors, already cluttered with film and computer equipment, became an even bigger menace to her health. Pieces of equipment came at her as if they had been catapulted her way at the end of trebuchets. Unlike the other staff in the building who had succumbed to their world collapsing around them, she kept dodging death by pulling light stands and camera tripods out of her like so many pins determined to treat her like a pin cushion. Her triple-stranded DNA was working overtime. She didn’t let the fact that she was stepping over dead bodies the entire time rattle her.

  She looked up and there were four goliath-bots tearing the building apart she was standing in from outside. This was the modern-day solution to a wrecking ball. The demolition bots were every bit as tall as the six story building she was standing in.

  With a little luck, she might survive the walls falling down on her, or possibly extricate herself from the vice-grip hands of one of the monsters. But playing the monster mash with all four goliath-bots, this far from the edge of the building… There was no escaping. That was the conclusion of her triple-stranded DNA system, designed for maximum combat readiness. A lot of good it was doing her right now.

  ***

  Elsa contented herself with exploring the Ugandan President’s palace. These guys tended to store a lot of precious commodities off-line, and off-grid. What self-serving bastard would be without his secret stash of billions buried under the floor, or mass weapons of destruction that would be unleashed on the world the second someone thwacked the beehive?

  Convinced her logic was unassailable despite having encountered no such booty so far, she descended into the bowels of the home. Bowels was definitely the right word for it. The catacombs running beneath the castle had a rough, unfinished look, and trailed a twisting, turning labyrinthine course reminiscent of the intestines of a living creature. They were sweating like any good mucous membrane-lined GI tract as well. In this case, she suspected the exudate was seeping water from an underground spring running under the castle.

  She wandered the tunnels expecting to find something. Why else site a palace over such a wealth of possible escape routes? Certainly escape was one of the things the President had in mind. But it couldn’t be all, could it?

  There it was. The stash she was looking for.

  Only, it wasn’t the shrink-wrapped, moisture-sealed millions that caught her attention.

  “Holy shit!” The tunnels were lined with biological weapons. All it would take was for one good earthquake or bunker buster bomb determined to reach down here for a mushroom cloud to escape that would sweep across the globe, killing God knows how many. Millions? Billions? No doubt one of his sick bastards had done the math to maximize the effects to where no one would dare mess with his doomsday device. Or had the President simply failed to tell anyone he had such a doomsday device in place? That would be a tad passive-aggressive, even for an evil despot.

  The ground was shaking. Just what she didn’t need right now. Something was happening on the surface. Another countermeasure perhaps? Another no-win scenario playing out for anyone who dared to assail his refuge against the bad cruel world the President did everything he could to make sure remained bad and cruel?

  The debate was no longer academic. The last shakeup did the unthinkable.

  The eruption had started that would trigger the mushroom cloud.

  And she was going along for the ride whether she liked it or not.

  There was just no escaping this situation. Not even for Houdini.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The lionesses were in trouble.

  There was little for the male lion to do now but get off his ass and come to their rescue. Though he was loath to do it. The noon day sun was blistering. And his rooftop view and what light breeze there was, and his newspaper, about the only solace from it.

  Alas, it wasn’t as if he didn’t realize his role in the pride didn’t come with a price.

  Roman shot off into seven different timelines at once. The seven that had the solutions to his seven unique challenges. The one timeline with the right fix for each problem out of hundreds, thousands of timelines with aborted attempts at rescue. He was being led by this neuronet, as dialed into his intuitive mind as it was to the cosmos.

  Even if he found the information he wanted, he had as of yet no idea how he was going to return in seven different versions of himself to save his pride. How he was going to be in seven different locations at once like some Saints who alone, at one time, or at least so it was recorded, were able to do.

  ***

  Roman rode the airwaves like Silver Surfer, on a board just a bit shorter, until he had Vera in his gri
p, and then, he sped away with her. The spherical satellite array, working with a hive-mind to coordinate it, gave pursuit, firing a potpourri of munitions, all of which were useless against the impervious energy shield he’d thrown up about himself and Vera. Impervious for now, at any rate.

  “They’ll find a way through your energy shield,” Vera shouted in his ear over the wind. “It’s what they’re designed to do. Their ASI is limited in its abilities, but what it does, it does quite well.”

  “I have no intention of giving them the satisfaction.”

  “So why aren’t you blowing them out of the sky?”

  “Asides from the fact that I have no clue how, I have a better idea.”

  “I’m not one for rushing the beat,” she said, staring back at their pursuers continuing to evolve their attack modalities at a mile a minute, “but I’m usually on the other end of these cat and mouse games.”

  “You still are. It’s just the hive mind that doesn’t appreciate it yet.” He took them up and out of the atmosphere.

  Their biohacked bodies would have to figure out how to deal with the absence of an atmosphere, the bone-chilling subzero temperatures of outer-space, and the solar radiation. Not to mention facilitate their communication in a medium that carried no sound. Alas, the jobs of nanite minions were never done. Or in the case of his own adaptations, a neuronet’s tasks were never quite finished.

  “I’ll forego the obvious questions as to how you’re pulling off this Silver Surfer routine, for now,” Vera said, “so long as you promise me we’re coming up on a punch line for this sad joke of a defense.”

  “The bastards have more than one impenetrable defense set up in orbit. I plan to take them all out.”

  She nodded. Snorted. Smiled. “No doubt a smart move. The only reason one corporation or another hasn’t activated one of these systems yet is they’re still calculating how to benefit from a planet full of do-gooders, all working like Santa’s Elves to make us a better world.”

  It wasn’t the first time Roman needed to be reminded that Ethan had managed to get an umbrella-like neural cap, just like the one he had, to unfold in everyone’s head across the globe, only DNA-based, and with none of the disadvantages of his early-tech model. “Are the powers that be that far gone to think no matter which way the wind blows, they will always float atop of everybody else?”

  “Nothing and no one has ever come along to shake up their sense of control.”

  “Maybe until today.” Roman zigzagged his way through the obstacle course of satellites in orbit, moving just fast enough that the drones firing on him had little time to consider the implications of their shots if they missed. He was using them to take out the other satellite solutions to an Earth run amuck, out of corporate control.

  There went the laser cannons big enough to erase entire cities from the map.

  Another volley of rounds fired at him and another number of near misses.

  There went the EMP rockets set to launch and return the planet to the Dark Ages, or any portion there of not under company control.

  The faster he maneuvered out of the drones’ way, the more they shot at him and unwittingly performed his cleanup op for him.

  The next thirty or so shots fired eliminated the bioweapons set to forever alter the DNA of humans in some way or another, all along corporate lines. Say creating two races, one of servants and one of overlords, where everyone knew their place for time immemorial. Or a zombie-like ninety-nine percent who’d spend their time devouring one another as crazed cannibals, clearing the planet for the remaining unaffected one percent to enjoy the resulting, underpopulated Eden.

  The bastards had any number of keep-em-in-check scenarios in play. Roman had picked up as much from his visits to those other timelines. Ones in which he’d succeeded in saving one or more of the girls, only to ultimately have zero impact on the endgame of the powers that be. It seemed that even Ethan’s masterstroke was just one of many the Big Brother Bad Boys were content to counter in stride.

  The job done, there was only one thing left to do: turn the drones on one another. He didn’t have enough space up in his head for that, as each one had a different unlock code, and a different path to turning them against one another. So he’d downloaded the intel to Vera’s triple-stranded DNA bio-weapons system, using the energy shield about them to handle the transfer of information from one timeline to another. That third strand of DNA could be used to procure nano hive minds that could hack the microsatellites for them. If not all, hopefully enough.

  “You ready?” he said.

  By now she’d caught on to what was going on. “Yeah.” Vera infiltrated the number of microsatellites she needed to, and down they went, just far enough and fast enough to realize the droids were no longer chasing them but dismantling one another with their self-evolving weaponry.

  One lioness saved.

  Six more to go.

  ***

  Roman was moving on Darya’s location next. As much as he wanted to rescue Elsa first, strangely she was the lowest priority. Why that was would become clear to the rest of the girls soon enough.

  Darya, not content to play the damsel in distress, had figured out how to extricate herself from the four goliath-bots tearing her building apart in the hopes of burying her alive under the rubble or simply crushing her in their maws. She jumped from the shoulder joint of one to the knee joint of another to the hip joint of a third, using tension wires, like Tarzan, either cables she’d snapped in the goliath-bots, or high-tension wires running to the building. Every time she severed the tendons in some goliath bot joint, she got nimbler and they got more awkward with chasing her down.

  But her sense of success was short-lived.

  Standing on the shoulder of the one-still-fully-erect goliath-bot, she could see an entire city of skyscrapers disassembling themselves, breaking into goliath-bots and coming after her. It was like one of those picture puzzles where you could have seen the cloaked goliath-bots only pretending to be buildings if only you’d looked closely enough and not let your eyes deceive you with what they expected to see. As it turned out, the goliath-bots stored well in vertical skyscraper configurations until they folded out origami-like on themselves.

  But now that the gig was up, she was looking to see if her Atom Ant abilities were up to flying between giants. And they might be for a time. But it was only a matter of time.

  The goliath-bot running towards her, and zealously knocking others out of the way for the pleasure of taking her out himself, pulled up short of splattering her across its visor like a bug on a windshield in freeway traffic.

  Roman reached towards her, extending the arm of the goliath-bot he was piloting, and opening the goliath-bot’s hand. She was surprised to find him in the cockpit inside the goliath-bot’s head. She jumped into the offered hand, and ran up the arm of the goliath-bot until she was seated in the cockpit beside him. Strapped in. “I had this covered,” she said.

  “Never doubted it.”

  “Now, how the hell do you plan on surviving a city full of goliath-bots intent on springing their trap?”

  “Watch and learn.” He ran the goliath-bot like a wide receiver going out for a pass, dodging tacklers coming at him from all directions simply by magnetic repulsion. His attackers found themselves flying backwards, as if pushed by invisible hands, only to tackle one another instead.

  “Ah, not beyond being inspired by the lowly pawns, I see, who live and die by their magnetic repulsing abilities.”

  “Theirs is a bit more advanced the mine, but mine will do the trick.”

  She noticed the degree to which she was being jarred even strapped in tight. Her triple-stranded DNA was fast at work un-severing her spine, and de-crushing a couple of her vertebrae. It was taking a fair amount of conscious control to keep the wincing off her face while her pain-suppression hormones kicked into high gear. Her insides felt like batter being whipped in a mixing bowl. Her hearing she’d had to dampen down to tolerate the rude scr
eeching metal sounds of goliath-bots crawling over one another to get to them and the smacks of thunder that were their feet making contact with the ground. She gave Roman a wary look. “You gonna be alright?” she said. “Not sure your neuronet is going to offer your body much protection against this kind of punishment.”

  “I thought that was the whole point of having a harem of hot girls. We get home, you heal me in a bout of passionate love by excreting all sorts of specialized nano.”

  She smiled without parting her lips. “Forget the pinup girl fantasy. By then you’ll be far more in love with me in the role of chiropractor.”

  He grunted. “True that.”

  ***

  Roman peeled the hoverboard off his back that had been serving as a backrest and shock absorber inside the goliath-bot, covering his tush and his legs as well, let it hover in front of him until it resumed its customary shape. Then set it to stand vertically by digging it into the sand. He twisted his back and his neck to work out the last of the kinks.

  The Sexy Six had Roman surrounded, their fists hiked up to their hips. They regarded one another. “Where’s Elsa?”

  “Saved her for last,” Roman said, from the center of the circle. He’d parked the goliath-bot at their rendezvous point, somewhere out in the desert, just north of the middle of nowhere. It towered over them like a strange sentinel left behind by some alien civilization from another era that once called this place home. It was the only sculptural feature marring the otherwise flat, featureless expanse for as far as the eye could see.

  He stood still as the six other versions of him ran into him from beyond the periphery of the circle, dissolving into him.

  The girls turned away at the moment of his reconstitution, as if expecting some blowback. “Thought you were never supposed to bring different versions of yourself from different timelines back together?” Svena said.