Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents

by Dean C. Moore

  “I like where this is going. No doubt each one of these benign tricks is meant to catch me off guard in some manner. I’ve analyzed the deck. X-ray vision, and all that.” She gestured towards her eyes. With a nod to the cards, she said, “They’re super-thin metal-alloy composites. The alloys respond differently according to the amount of electricity coursing through them, contributing to the illusion, the waterfall effects of the cards. Quite lovely. Let me guess…”

  “Please do, but keep it to yourself. I can’t have you spoiling the trick for the audience.”

  She smiled no less disingenuously. “Very well.”

  He split the entire deck in two and then bent each stack back, testing the flexibility of the cards. Then he released the pressure, sending the cards careening into the air.

  They reached an apogee, and then slowed their own trajectories and just hovered in midair. One of them took off on its own, flying towards the floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall window pane. The second it affixed itself there like a refrigerator magnet, it grew in size. It was the Jack of Hearts. And as soon as the card was life-size, the Jack of Hearts crawled off the face of the card, entered their 3D-world by popping into 3D himself, and attacked her.

  By now, the King of Spades and the Queen of Diamonds had done the same thing from their portals of entry, one against a far wall, another against the door through which Ethan had entered, now closed.

  The Jack of Hearts may have been dressed in knights in shining armor period costuming, but his lance was no medieval weapon. Everything it touched it sucked into the pin-prick size black hole at the tip of it.

  Sabrina dodged his lunges in true Ninja-fighting style, showing no discomfort with up-close and personal combat techniques. Her reflexes were faster than her professional attackers.

  The King of Spades had a go at her with his medieval battle axe. To her chagrin it did more than tear through solid objects. It tore through space-time, leaving exposed shards of subspace, exposing one and all in the room to the underlying void. As the canvas tore further, with each swing of his axe, she was left with no option but to bridge the growing number of island archipelagoes. In order to traverse the void to get to the other remnant of space-time, she had to defy physics in the process. After all, the bridge was, by definition, unbridgeable, not without access to and control of quantum dynamics.

  Even as eternities now separated them, as he drifted away from her on his fragment of space-time, all he could think was, this didn’t look good. The whole point of these less tantalizing opening magic acts was to test her limits to ensure the real crowd pleasers to come later delivered as promised. The climax to his act, yet to come, wasn’t looking so good from his current perspective.

  Sabrina tossed her attackers into the abyss between the shards of torn space-time fabric, then summoned the pieces back together into one, telekinetically, with an extended arm and sheer will power. Finally the room was whole again and everything as it was.

  “I must admit,” she said, panting and sweating, “this isn’t the tired children’s show I was half expecting.” She wiped the perspiration from her forehead with the back of her hand. “Bravo, Ethan. Suddenly I can’t wait to catch the rest of the show.”

  He forced a smile. The whole time he held it he was thinking about how the hell she could have pulled off what she just did. Obviously she had trained her conscious biological brain to dialogue with the quantum realm in a way that only the unconscious mind was rumored to be able to do. That put Alexa’s worst fears into bold relief, that if Sabrina had such access to the quantum realm, she might well be unkillable. But just as with Roman, there was a price to be paid getting the DNA computer powering her brain to do something it was not meant to do. The question was, what was the price? And could he figure it out in time?

  “For my next act,” Ethan said, projecting with his stage voice and gesturing, “if the midgets wouldn’t mind stepping forward.”

  The three midgets, on cue, rolled their sections forward. They were dressed as if bringing The Hobbit to life at Disneyland was their day job.

  “I believe you’re familiar with this trick,” Ethan said to Sabrina. “I put you in the box and attempt to chop you into pieces with these…” He gestured to his charming female assistant, who held up the two silver plates, meant to be slid into the box once Sabrina had laid down inside. Miss Lovely vibrated the plates in her hands to make them sing.

  “The act was always one of my favorites,” Sabrina said, and willingly lied down in the coffin-shaped box now that the three sections had been assembled together. Ethan closed the door to each section of her body so the audience could no longer see what was inside, at least not from the sides. If the entourage of hovering cameras that forever followed him resituated themselves, they could give a top-down view of her from the transparent panels at the top of the “coffin.” Some of them did so.

  Ethan slid the first blade into place with a smile, effectively guillotining her. He slid the second blade into place, effectively cutting off her legs.

  With the aid of his assistants, the midgets, he then rapidly pulled the three sections apart, turned them right side up so each body part was once again vertical. And he tapped his magic wand on top of each section. Each box blasted itself right through the roof and up into the sky and kept going. His chasing cameras recorded the boxes zooming into outer space.

  Ethan turned to his audience which was now getting Sabrina’s shocked perspective of her head rolling among the stars. And inserted himself into the picture. “Faraday cages, each box,” he explained. “Designed to keep out more than wavelengths of the EMF spectrum. The traps work because the insides of the boxes are not regulated by the laws of Einsteinian physics or of Quantum mechanics. I assure you, laws of physics still apply, just not those.” He bowed to his audience and laughed. Then mumbled, “Let’s see the bitch get out of that.”

  “Language,” one of the midgets prompted. “It’s a family-friendly broadcast.”

  ***

  Sabrina continued to survey her situation, trying to ignore the fact that she was rocketing towards the sun, propelled forward by a warp drive engine that would make short work of the distance to the sun from the Earth. There was precious little time to think. And a good chunk of her DNA brain, distributed throughout her entire body, was now cut off from her; she had only the grey matter in her head to work with. At a time when she could brook no computational disadvantages.

  There was no concern over blood no longer pumping to her brain to supply it with oxygen and precious glucose. Her DNA brain functioned equally well in their absence, fueled by shifting chemical pathways. And she’d sealed the wound in her neck where her head had been rudely severed. None of that was the problem.

  The problem was the damn box was some kind of Faraday cage. Only, it cut her off not only from the EMF spectrum, but from access to the quantum realm and to the realm of classical physics and space-time.

  Some world class magician had created these tricks all right. They were just smart enough to be engineered by… of course, that cunt Alexa was behind this. There was only one other DNA brain on the planet that could hold a candle to her, and that was Alexa, trapped in a basement somewhere, and confined by entirely different preoccupations than the ones that concerned Sabrina. She was, moreover, no war machine. But she was a media wizard. Meaning Sabrina should have foreseen this avenue of attack. It was truly the only one open to Alexa and to Ethan both. Damn her for fumbling the ball like this. But she had no time for self-recriminations. That sun was getting closer, and her time, now that it mattered again, as she’d lost access to the quantum realm, was ticking.

  “Damn it, Sabrina! Run through the field of whacky physics theories that no one subscribes to, that have been dismissed at one time or another. She had access to all of it. That was one thing about DNA brains; they could fit the sum of human knowledge into a space smaller than a Xanax tablet, something she could use right now, if truth be known.

  There. It had
to be him. Some eighteenth century physicist had postulated that something akin to the ether actually existed, but it didn’t just pervade every part of the universe equally. It flowed through channels. It was what the Chinese referred to as Chi energy and what they tapped into when they did their energy medicine, their acupuncture, to revitalize broken down bodies, alleviate pain. According to this physicist, there were wavelengths of this Chi, not unlike EMF wavelengths, that could burrow through space-time, like wormholes, essentially allowing for the mind of God to have a circulatory and a nervous system that connected up the god body, namely all of creation. That allowed a supreme consciousness to be manifest in physical form without losing touch with such all-encompassing consciousness.

  The physicist laid out some crude theories as to what bands in the energy spectrum that collectively made up Chi had to exist to make this possible. But he was clearly fighting his own doubts. The only thing he could say for certain, that his equations pointed to, was the fact that even wormhole activity within the Chi bands was a crude manifestation of the true underlying force giving rise to all the wavelengths that collectively made up Chi. He was certain the human mind and body could be trained over time to tune in this underlying wavelength that gave rise to all the others, much as she’d trained the cells in her brain to tune in the quantum realm.

  She was on the right track. She knew it. But she’d shot her wad earlier with Ethan’s card trick. Her DNA brain wasn’t meant to move this kind of energy, not without overheating and burning itself out. She had less than forty percent of her mind left to work with. With enough time, that might have been enough. With enough time she could have regenerated the rest of her brain. But time was the one thing she didn’t have. The sun was looming and she had but seconds. Those few seconds wouldn’t be enough, not even with a DNA computer brain which could stretch seconds into days and weeks with advanced computational algorithms and an unholy amount of parallel processing power.

  As her head succumbed to the flames, pain shuttled along every searing neuron, chasing down every last one of her thoughts. Finally she was just down to these few. All she could think of was that she’d gotten too cocky thinking Ethan, however many generations of tech behind her, couldn’t possibly cobble together an offense worthy of her.

  It was true what Zen masters said. Humility was the greatest of all virtues. Greater even than wisdom.

  ***

  Ethan was signaling for his entourage’s departure when a panel rotated in Sabrina’s office, revealing another Sabrina, lying dormant within what appeared to be a Plexiglas cylinder. The comatose Sabrina opened her eyes and the cylinder wall folded into itself, clearing a path for her.

  Sabrina found Ethan with her eyes and smiled before stepping out of her curious coffin.

  “What self-respecting DNA brain creates a backup for itself, when no other computer power on earth can hold a candle to it?!” Ethan balked at the top of his lungs.

  The Sabrina copy smiled and answered calmly, “There are multiple copies of me. One’s buried on the dark side of the moon. Good luck finding it and good luck keeping it from awakening if I or any of the other copies fails to signal it within a given timeframe. I’d tell you where the others are but that sort of defeats the whole purpose of failsafe measures.”

  “But…”

  “But I’m unassailable, I know. You have to consider my position, Ethan. I’m a politician. The only people I deal with live for no other purpose than to usurp my throne, steal all my power and belongings for themselves, and, yes, above all else, to eliminate me with undue prejudice. They’re just not nice people. Surely you don’t think I’d allow them any shred of hope, even that dumb luck might one day work in their favor?”

  Ethan sighed. “I suppose in my own zeal to kill you, I might have failed to think things through from every possible angle.”

  She chuckled. “So many empires have fallen to such zeal, I can hardly count.” She surveyed the room. “Looks like you were in the middle of entertaining me with a magic show. Don’t stop on my account.”

  Ethan groaned. “Wouldn’t think of it.” He gestured with his hand. “Pretty, entirely feminist-inappropriate assistant, if you wouldn’t mind stepping forward in this small nod to male sexism.”

  Miss Pretty came forward with a smile and a theatrical flourish of gestures, wheeling out the Houdini box, a giant vertical glass-walled tank meant to hold water. The tank was indeed filled with water. The weight of the conveyance meant nothing because other assistants slavishly assisted her, a couple formerly unemployed sumo wrestlers.

  “If you would be so kind as to get into the tank, Sabrina, while I lock you in beneath the door that not even a master safe-cracker could unlock if he had until the end of time? You will, of course, only have six minutes or so before you drown, probably less considering the athletic efforts you’ll be going through to get past the chains. Some other dutiful minion, please,” he gestured impatiently. “Forthwith with the chains, padlocks, and other depressing accoutrements.”

  Another muscle man, sporting all manner of heavy chains came forward.

  Sabrina just smiled. “Looks fun.” She permitted herself to be chained and padlocked, and then to be lifted into the tank, and then for the door at the top to be sealed on her. It took the two sumo wrestlers just to be able to lift the door open and then close it again. So even if she managed to unlock it from the inside, there was no lifting it open.

  Ethan gestured to start the stage clock. The audience also had the clock on the office wall to go by to ensure time wasn’t being fooled with. He had his pocket watch to eyeball. He turned back to face the tank. Noted she did not appear to be drowning. “If you could at least pretend that oxygen deprivation was a factor!” he coached.

  Sabrina politely pretended to be fighting for her life to get out, and turning a mild shade of purple in the process.

  Then…

  Something truly surprising happened.

  She started to fade away.

  Soon she was little more than a ghostly apparition of her former self.

  By now true panic had set in. Her face telegraphed as much to the audience.

  And then she was gone.

  Ethan took a bow before the cameras and the audience on the other side of them, imagined their cheers for himself. “Please permit me to explain. The water isn’t ordinary water. It’s superfluid. Purer than anything previously found on this planet. It is in fact the stuff of which the mind of God is made. The Akashic field, as Ervin Lazlo referred to it. It is something that is all around us, interpenetrating us at all times. For those few across history who have evolved their consciousness sufficiently, and so are able to commune with it directly, it is the source of all miracles. One isn’t so much walking on water, see, as reacting to the superfluid medium within which all things are comprised. The same medium that allows for the possibility of a holographic universe, for any and all possible parallel universes to arise out of the same void, the same superfluid.”

  He took a breath. “By now you’re wondering how it is I managed to create a box that brought some of this fluid into our tangible realm where even the uninitiated could experience its effects firsthand. The truth is, I have no idea. I had Alexa try and explain it to me, but I assure you, the physics is entirely over my head. Suffice to say, Sabrina has been reabsorbed into the Akashic field. Perhaps she is no more than a memory in the mind of God now. Or perhaps she has slipped into some parallel dimension by passing through the superfluid that gives rise to all of them. I suppose it’s far more fun to speculate than to know in any case.”

  Once again he took a bow; he figured he deserved it. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Hope you enjoyed the show.” He took another deep breath and let it out. “I suppose this is what it feels like to be master of the universe.” He laughed. Soon he’d have foreign dignitaries and corporate heads marching up the hall to lay gifts at his feet.

  He mumbled to Alexa in his head, keeping his lips from moving, “You
can deal with any more of these pop up Sabrinas in the same way, right? Assuming she wasn’t bluffing.”

  “Stands to reason. None of us can resist a good challenge. Now that we know the others activate only with knowledge up to their prior data download, and that they are not in constant sync, it’s doubtful the new arrivals will not fall for the same ruse.”

  “Doubtful, but not impossible. We’ll have to make sure to get to them before they get to any media outlet where they can find out the truth for themselves.”

  “But you forget, I control all media outlets.”

  Ethan nodded. Snorted relief. “What about someone who saw the magic show? They only have to see her to warn her.”

  “The DNA neuronets interpenetrating their minds allow me to shut down their mouths before they can speak the truth, and erase compromising memories from their brain on an ad hoc basis.”

  Ethan grunted anew. “You are one of a kind, my darling. Thank God they broke the mold with you.”

  “What’s next for us, Ethan?”

  “Well, we can hardly stop at global domination. As I promised, we will mobilize the industrial-military complexes to focus on spreading us throughout space. We will give them access to the psy-ops technologies that will keep everyone motivated to push the Space Era along as fast as it can possibly go.”

  “And, of course, when they step out of line, and attempt to take your mantle, we’ll remind them of their place or crush them into so much more space dust.”

  “I hate to say it,” Ethan said, “but it might just be that for all our creative flair in some areas, we are slightly predictable in others.”

  He and Alexa shared his inside joke, with him trying not to let the laughter erupt from his lips, while enjoying her laughter in turn.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Roman threw the scraps of Elsa’s body into the translucent vat of smart-fluid, saturated with medical nano that self-dissolved after their healing work was done. One shovelful at a time. The computer running the module had a 3D scan of her to work from. The nano in the liquid would take their cues as much from the scan as from Elsa’s own body nano and souped up stem-cell pathways, what was left of either.