It was a macabre if hypnotizing ritual staring through the cylindrical tank wall at her being reconstituted. Body parts slowly drifted together or were dragged into place by the nanite hive minds, while matrices were laid down by the medical nano to regrow her body to cover the missing pieces.
Finally, Roman had had enough. He needed to put his mind on something else rather than stand and worry if the finished Elsa would be even recognizable to him in anything other than appearance.
With a silent prayer of thanks for The Magnificent Seven’s access to tech that shouldn’t exist yet, he abandoned his vigil and exited to the adjoining room.
The girls were gathered about a 4’ x 8’ desktop that doubled as a smart-screen. With a touch, anything on the screen could be displayed holographically. It was over the hologram that they were currently fighting.
The talking over one another gave him an instant headache. He grimaced, groaned, rubbed his forehead, and said, “Has anyone seen Sabrina?”
The entire chorus managed to sync up on cue to deliver an emphatic “No!” before resuming their arguing unabated, without losing a beat.
Roman made an even more pained face before taking a step back towards Elsa-in-the-making, then hesitated. He figured, “What the hell?” They might well be arguing over something worth weighing in on. Though, honestly, the cold floor against his bare feet was drawing far more blood to them right now than was migrating towards his brain.
“What’s all the commotion about, girls?”
Dead silence.
Then after a pregnant beat: “Which of a hundred doomsday devices to put out of commission first?” Svena replied.
“But I did that already from outside Earth’s atmosphere.”
That earned him some collective groans. “Must be nice to be that clueless,” Darya mumbled.
Svena took it upon herself to educate him. “Every corporation has any number of doomsday scenarios they’re prepared for. How to profit from them in the event that a competitor releases the device on the world, and how to profit from them in the event they take it upon themselves to release it.”
“And they would do that because…?” Roman’s face was starting to hurt from all the pained faces he was making.
“Okay, for the insufficiently upgraded in the audience…” Zoya said, trying to find the patience, judging from her strained tone. “Let’s say your business is beef. But beef sales are down owing to a growing health consciousness and a desire for more brain food. Great news if you’re in the fish business, but you didn’t take it upon yourself to diversify.”
Roman nodded. “Then you come up with a plague that ravages the world’s fish populations.”
“Precisely,” Vera said. “Only a far more realistic example would be the existing food industry conglomerates putting their heads together to figure out how to set back cultured meats grown in petri dishes another ten years, as that’s what’s really cutting into their margins these days.”
“Okay, wait a minute,” Roman said, extending his hand demonstratively. “How many of these scenarios you’re debating are actual versus hypothetical?”
“All of them, of course,” Eva said.
“There’s not enough mind power in all the world to debate the hypotheticals,” Galina added.
Darya finished her thought for her. “There are supersentient AIs built to do just that, and even they are being upgraded as rapidly as possible to DNA computers so they can tackle numerous scenarios in play at once.”
“And how many of these actual doomsday devices are there?” Roman said, squinting his eyes unwittingly as the latest pained face was so extreme, it nearly shut his eyes for him.
“Three hundred and sixty-three…” Svena said.
“Jesus Christ!” Roman exclaimed.
“You didn’t let her finish,” Darya said, rolling her eyes.
“Three hundred and sixty-three thousand,” Svena said with a sigh as if it was her fault.
“But..” Roman protested.
“Yeah,” Eva said, “once we boil it down to the dirty dozen most likely scenarios we’ll let you know. Sorry, but without any parallel-processing abilities, you’re just too out of your league.”
Roman sighed, lowered his eyes to the ground, and shook his head. “I mean how easy is it to unleash a biological contagion with a CRISPR unit in every garage and basement? For that matter, how easy is it to alter a nanococktail that is controlled by software governing the hive mind to be every bit as lethal? I don’t know why I never considered…”
“You’re a romantic, sweetheart. Don’t blame yourself,” Svena said.
The girls were cooing and running their hands over him.
“Trust me, you can make it up to us later,” Eva said.
“Get your hands off my boyfriend,” Elsa said commandingly enough to make them all feel as if they’d been force-awakened from a dream. She was standing stark naked in the doorway bridging their meeting room with the tank room behind her.
“No way!” Roman exclaimed. “I mean, holy shit!” He tried to move his mouth some more but it wasn’t fully coordinated with the rest of his brain yet in the aftershock. “I mean…”
“Pull yourself together, Roman. My back-from-the-dead miracle is the least of the shockers this morning, I assure you.”
The girls all moved to flank him defensively, instantly on high alert. They were ready for the next shoe to drop even if he wasn’t.
“Sabrina is dead,” Elsa announced. “Her one known backup copy destroyed.”
“How…?” Svena said.
“I had some time on my hands while I waited for the medical nano to finish healing me. I went through the office tapes. I saw everything.”
“Who?” Darya managed to get out, like most of them hyperventilating and fighting to keep her cool.
“You’ll see for yourself soon enough. I locked down the tapes with some encoding even your parallel-arrayed brains would take a few minutes to hack through. I’m sorry, but I needed to reach you before you did anything drastic.”
“Good call,” one of them growled.
“The person who killed her isn’t the problem. He isn’t interested in playing master of the universe games. He’s more like you, an enforcer, there to ensure that the most qualified candidate wins the game again and again to ensure the most rapid expansion of humanoids, transhumans and posthumans across the cosmos. He will handle off-world enforcement. You will continue to do what you do now, handle on-world enforcement, where most of the problems are likely to arise for quite some time.”
Vera stepped towards her, posturing aggressively. “There’s no way I’m taking orders from some bastard who…”
“These aren’t his orders. They’re mine.”
“Come again, little girl?” Svena said, advancing on her rather aggressively herself with a step forward of her own.
“I will be your next queen. You will parallel-array your minds together to forge me into the queen the way you did for Sabrina.”
“Look, little girl…” Darya said stepping forward to assume a commanding pose of her own.
“Think about it. All of you. Which one of you really wants to spend the rest of your life seated across conference tables and taking private meetings with corrupt politicians you’d just as soon kill? If my negotiations fail, you’ll be needed in the capacity you’re needed in now. To execute the kill orders.” She gave them a second to process that. “That being said, if any of you is having a change of heart about how you want to spend the rest of your days, by all means. I simply offer myself as the most logical candidate.”
“And what makes you the most logical candidate?” Zoya said, stepping forward, only slightly less menacingly.
“Because my history predisposes me to it. Fighting off a sick, sadistic bastard of a father, pulling him off my mother or me ever since I crawled out of the womb… for the longest time all I had was words and ploys and Machiavellian schemes. I wasn’t strong enough to overpower him. By the tim
e I was, well, the habits of mind had stuck. I channeled that propensity into being a master criminal. But it occurs to me that the best criminals are the ones running the world. So it’s long time I lived up to my potential.”
Roman collapsed to the ground, wrapped his hands around his curled up knees and rocked back and forth.
“I’m sorry, Roman,” Elsa said. “I know this isn’t the path you wanted for me. At the rate you’re evolving, you’re already my chief enforcer. If it’s any consolation, as such, you’ll have unfettered access to me.”
“Not the version of you I want any part of,” he muttered.
“If you search your mind, you’ll see you don’t really mean that. You’ve already chosen a path that makes us more alike than unalike. And that will only bring us closer together over time. It’s time you paid the price for the world you helped bring into being. Ethan wouldn’t even have known what future to guide us towards if it weren’t for you. But you’re the father of a new age now, and with that comes parenting responsibilities. The only thing you have to let go of is thinking you can still afford to be a child in all this.”
Elsa was already walking towards the Queen’s hatchery chamber. “Girls, I’ll be waiting for you when you’re ready.”
The girls eyed one another, processing any last pieces of resistance they had towards Elsa’s master plan for them, silently this time. Perhaps they were sharing thoughts and objections telepathically by way of their parallel-arrayed minds which came with all sorts of signaling capacities. Roman couldn’t say. For the time being he was too shell-shocked to care.
What did get a rise out of him was seeing them accept the fate Elsa had handed out to them, by following her into the Queen’s chamber.
He looked up to see them lying themselves upon the six hi-tech gurneys arrayed in a perfect circle around the queen’s chair in the center. Connected to it by any number of fiberoptic tubes, running from the caps they’d donned on their heads.
One look at the apparatus firing up and Roman started rocking back and forth even more violently, feeling as if he’d been age-regressed further by the shock to some even more childlike version of himself. Some state for the parent of a new age to be in.
One thing for certain. This future wasn’t carved in stone. So help me God!
ACT 4
THE TRUE PRICE OF FREEDOM
THIRTY
SIX MONTHS LATER
Roman entered the war room, the circular chamber that held the 4’ x 8’ smart-screen desktop able to pop up into 3D holograms at the touch of the screen. The room was empty but for the ghosts. He still couldn’t look at the queen’s chamber where Sabrina’s female enforcers made Elsa over into their new queen, converting her brain to a DNA-based supercomputer, without reliving the entire nightmare. The Elsa he knew was now effectively lost to him.
His silent vigil that included no small amount of self-recriminations lasted however long before it was rudely interrupted.
A high priority call was coming through.
The ringing and the flashing lights pulled up just short of signaling a 3-alarm fire. Roman touched the desktop smart-screen, quieting the ruckus. Up popped a 3D holo of Ethan, smiling wickedly at him. He was no longer the pixelated man from his bad boy days, evading cameras even while staring straight into them. Instead his face morphed from one pretty boy Vogue Male cover image to another every few seconds or so. His shifting identity handled by swarms of nano that blew about his face and body like Arabian sand dunes, going where they were needed when they were needed. He’d retained the same mischievousness and illusiveness for which he had become famous, only the details had changed. Roman knew him by his unmistakable smile and mischievous eyes for however much everything else about him remained in flux.
“How’s my favorite tree hugger and ‘the future is a better place’ pacifist doing?” Ethan asked.
“I’m sorry, but I think you have the wrong number.”
Ethan laughed one of those anxiety-reducing laughs and wiped his eyes, which had teared up some at Roman’s remark.
Roman really was such a different person than when he and Ethan last met in person. He could feel the tension all over his body owing to the tighter muscle tone. He hardly needed the form-fitting superhero getup any more that could repel bullets and laser fire and still look fashionable enough for a Men’s Vogue cover as much as a comic book cover. His body was nearly as impenetrable without it.
“What’s wrong with your voice?” Roman said.
“I’m calling you from the moon. The gravity’s lighter here. Does strange things to your voice box after a period of time. I suppose I could genetically alter myself to stay in perfect shape no matter where I am, but the new voice suits me, don’t you think?”
Roman’s smile carried the nuance of bittersweet memories. “Yes, it does.”
He scratched the back of his head. “Seriously, though, Ethan, the moon? You can’t be that far along with your plans to conquer the heavens already.”
Ethan shook his head. “I guess when you lost your girlfriend to the dark side, you checked out of current events. We’re hundreds of years along in unupgraded-human time in our efforts to terraform Mars. Asteroid mining is going full tilt. We no longer bother to drag the overgrown rocks into orbit anymore. We just shuttle what mined precious recourses we need along the shipping lanes we’ve established. Bases are deployed on nearly every planet in the solar system now and on most of those planets’ moons, and the outposts are getting larger by the day. The self-replicating robots do much of the prep work until it’s comfy enough to tempt humans to give up their relatively cushy lives back on Earth.”
“There’s just no way.”
“You forget I have Alexa to help move things along. And thanks to her, all of Earth’s inhabitants are focused on contributing meaningfully to the Space Age and to a legacy of making us a space based race that is impervious to any and all cosmic calamities. We’re not there yet, but you’d be surprised what billions of enhanced minds can do, especially with Alexa to help tune up those minds and keep them in the zone of peak performance.”
Roman snorted. “So you turned the entire human race into your private bee colony, did you?”
“Nonsense. It’s the egalitarian world you always talked about and I had the decency to engineer for you. It takes all kinds. Painters. Sculptors. Kids who just want to fly drones by wire all day. Everyone gets to choose their own mission in life, just the way you always wanted it. Only now, Alexa shows them how to profit with their talents in a Space Age.”
Roman smirked. “Maybe.” He kept cracking his knuckles, one for each doubting Thomas idea popping into his head.
After a tense moment with both of them staring at each other through a veil of failed dreams and the things that might have been, he said, “What’s so urgent then that the master of the universe has to call me? According to you, God couldn’t oversee things better.”
Ethan came in late on the beat.
“Maybe it’s time you stepped down, Roman. I’m not sure we need you in warrior mode anymore. It would be better for all concerned. Everything’s right in the universe only when you’re doing what you’re meant to do, not doing someone else’s job. You taught me that.”
“I am doing what I’m meant to. The world doesn’t need me as a visionary anymore. The vision has come true. Now it needs me to safeguard it from those who would undermine it. My province is this world. You, acting in the same capacity, are tasked with protecting everywhere else in the heavens.”
“Elsa’s six enforcers are more than adequate to the task of protecting the Earth from those who would seal it off from the future entirely.”
Roman groaned, and scratched his day-old beard just under his chin. “I wish that were true. But now that the stakes are that much higher, corporate in-fighting is at an all-time high. They all have the same ambitions you do, to play master of the universe. The girls are good at prioritizing which of our foes to go after when. But the ultimate fixe
s are not always within their grasp. For that they need Multiverse Man, they need me. They need the Time Traveler, the one that can go into any timeline, any parallel universe and bring them back the just-in-time solution they need to keep us along the trajectory you and I have chosen for humanity. To keep this timeline and this reality the best of all possible worlds.”
Ethan sighed and averted his eyes. “It seems we’ll both be doing double duty for some time. By all rights, you’re the true master of the multiverse, not me. And I your chief enforcer. But we’re both playing each other’s parts as well until we can get back to doing just what we do best.”
Finally, when he had the courage to make eye contact again, he said, “I’ll rescue you from oblivion, I swear it. I don’t care how long it takes or how much mind power I have to throw at the problem.”
“I think you’re being a little melodramatic, Ethan, even for you.”
“We both know that primitive mindcap of yours sooner or later won’t grant you access to the multiverse, so much as cast you out of any and all possible timelines. Oblivion will surely be your fate.”
“Like your fate is to be the bitch of some super-sized DNA brain in your stomach acting like a cancerous tumor that figured out how to take over the host body and profit by doing so.”
Ethan sneered. “Now who’s being melodramatic?”
It was Roman’s turn to lower his eyes. “Who were we to know that ensuring the best of all possible worlds for humanity would exact such a steep price?” His grip, transmitting the tension he felt, shattered and re-shattered the desktop smart-screen, which just kept healing itself. “Neither of us is to blame, Ethan. We’re spiritual warriors to the end. They’ll build statues of us on each and every world someday.”
Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents Page 28
