Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents

by Dean C. Moore

  Samson studied his face, searching for a reason to override his own resistance to telling him. Must have found reason enough for compassion, because he finally opened up. “We still don’t know, honestly. Some nanococktail was one of many theories floating around at the time. It ate our cities. The global population at the time was around 8 billion. Before it devoured every last scrap of high-tech, the hive mind must have realized it needed an alternative food source. So it switched to eating people. It pulled up short of devouring every last one of us when it realized that once again it needed to adapt to a new food source to maintain its explosive rate of growth. That’s when they morphed into sun-eaters. Much like chlorophyll, they now feed off the sun’s energy directly. They’re in everything. Every leaf on every tree, in the bacteria in the soil, the very sexual organs of the flowers. They’re in us too. As a consequence, we feed off the sun as well. What you witnessed here today, well, I hate to say it, but that was just sport. A way of passing the time.”

  “Just how many of you remain?” Roman asked.

  “Every tribe I’ve ever run into has a few dozen maybe. Assuming that’s the pattern all over the world, I don’t know, tens of thousands.”

  He glanced back at Darya and Zoya. “Hey, you two Amazons done over there? You’re playing around with my sole reason for living.”

  “Yeah, we’re done,” Zoya said. “You can have your little toy back.”

  Svena passed her hand along Samson’s exposed chest. That’s all it took. “What the…?” The next thing he knew he was humping her against a tree. Not because she’d come on to him. More like she’d taken over his mind with her nano. It was doubtful, though tempted, he’d have subjected her to his virus, no matter how much he wanted to hump her. Svena obviously had an agenda and concerns all her own.

  Preston caught the hoverboard that the two girls had sent drifting towards Samson, before he got all preoccupied. He’d meant no doubt just to hold on to it for him. But his magnetic fields started acting up in such close proximity to the device and it went hurtling into the sky. Where it just drifted miles away from him.

  Preston put up his hands demonstratively. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. They told me rolling right off the assembly line, ‘Do not fuck with time travel’. But did you listen? No.”

  “Sorry, I don’t know what came over me,” Samson said, still pressed up against the tree, with Svena trapped to his underside.

  “I did,” she said. “Just running some experiments. Didn’t mean to use you like that.”

  He smiled, relaxing. “Any time. Though why you’d wish to be infected with my virus, I’ll never know.”

  He gazed up at the sky. “Hey! My hoverboard.”

  “Sorry, man,” Preston said, again with the big gestures. “Totally unintentional. The only thing I do willfully is assassinate people and hump dead bodies.”

  Samson sighed, shaking his head slowly. He was too distraught over this latest wrong turn in his life to worry too much about what Preston had just said. “That’s okay. Sometimes happens in the heat of the hunt. Just have to stay alive between here and there until I get it back. Actually, it’s part of the game. You’ll notice no one running to my rescue.”

  He waved at them. “Well, nice meeting you ladies and gents. Wish you all the luck with saving yourselves and your world. Trust me, I feel your pain.” And with that, he was off to collect his hoverboard. He didn’t get too far before Roman and the others heard one of the Megasauruses chasing after him, and not too long after that until the giant, towering over the trees, came into view.

  “Meant to ask him,” Roman said, “how such an advanced civilization could coexist with dinosaurs. But then again, we’re bringing them back from the dead back on our world. So I shouldn’t be so surprised.”

  “Report,” Galina said to the rest of the girls, curious to get the puzzle pieces so she could start assembling them in her head.

  “Well, Ronin wasn’t giving us the full story.” Svena was still wiping his saliva off her lips. “It was his runaway nanites that brought an end to this world. “The idiots were trying to build a nuclear fusion reactor entirely with a nanite hive mind, using the self-replicating nanites to both initiate and sustain the reaction. The idea was to power entire cities off of it, and to use the mind power it would have, with so much energy to drive it, to oversee the city as a city-wide AI. All at the cost of a few grains of sand.”

  “The anti-gravity board is more sophisticated than it looks,” Zoya said. “It can automatically adjust to any gravity-well anomaly, meaning it can surf all of space-time, worlds many times as large as this, or many times smaller, hell, the sun, black holes even, provided…”

  “Provided the hardware holds up,” Darya explained. “From what I can tell, it should. Though I’m not entirely sure why.”

  “I think I can answer that,” Zoya said. “On an atomic scale, each atom is bubble-wrapped in its own subspace continuum. Sort of like what the neuronet is doing to every cell of Roman’s body.”

  Roman snorted. “I think we can call that a puzzle piece.”

  Galina said, “You two can replicate the hoverboard?”

  “Yeah,” Darya said, “Given some time to figure out how the subspace continuum interacts with the avionics exactly.”

  “How much time?” Galina said, impatiently.

  Both Zoya and Darya shrugged their shoulders. “We’ve been working on the very same problem vis-à-vis Roman’s mind. Without knowing for sure what’s different in how the hoverboard works its magic from how Roman’s neuronet works its…”

  “Get the damn hoverboard just in case your scans missed something,” Galina said.

  “What about…?” Roman said.

  “Ronin?” Galina harrumphed. “Screw him. The man put an end to his world. Why should I spare him the guilt or the distraction from it?” She turned to Preston. “Do your thing tin man.”

  “First of all, let me just say, I resent the use of the term Tin Man.” Preston straightened himself up and fidgeted with his appearance again. “Secondly…”

  “You’ve got ten seconds to get that thing back or you’ll know what it’s like for a golden retriever to be thrown into a dog pen with a bunch of pit bulls,” Galina said.

  He bowed. “Thank you. I’m so much better under pressure.” Preston extended his hand to the hoverboard, only managed to push it further away from where it was perched in the sky. He groaned and took a deep breath. On the fourth try he got it. Darya kept hold of it this time, not wanting to risk another misfire of Preston’s magnetic coils.

  Galina looked lost in thought. “What’s going through your mind?” Roman asked.

  Before she could answer, another of the Godzilla-size dinosaurs had joined the hunt for the elusive Ronin. It tromped right over them, not missing this time. Roman and Preston were saved by the quick responses of the six girls. They just held their hands over their heads and morphed their genetics on the fly to provide adequate shock absorption.

  “I’m sorry, you were saying…” Preston said sarcastically to Roman. “Seriously, dude, this is not the time to have an ‘all about me’ moment.” He wiped the mud splatter off his face and practically fainted at the sight of still more crud stuck to his suit’s finely pressed slacks.

  Everyone ignored him per the usual.

  “We ought to be able to counteract the mold that’s morphed our world back into the Stone Age enough to get the DNA-neural nets fired up again, and everyone’s mind back on line,” Galina said. “Better yet, we have the virus Svena highjacked from Ronin to call anyone’s bluff should they try any nonsense like this again. The two countermeasures together should put quite the kibosh on nanococktail attacks on our timeline.”

  She turned to Roman. “If we can then marry those technologies to your body, along with what tweaks we can apply from lessons learned from the hoverboard, we might just be able to stabilize you enough in our timeline, if not indefinitely, long enough for your neural net to steer us to an e
ven more effective, long-term solution.”

  Roman groaned. “That’s a lot of ifs and even if you’re right about buying me time, you’re giving my neuronet a lot of sway over the Magnificent Seven, meant to be protecting the entire planet, not just me. In its own way it’s now holding the entire Earth hostage. Not sure in this David and Goliath story, David is meant to win.”

  “You let us handle the Machiavellian schemes,” Svena said, “it’s what we do best.”

  “So, we’re out of here then?” Preston interjected. “Not a moment too soon.” He hoofed it towards the Phantom mumbling, “You mobile seat, come over here and attend my slacks. If you don’t get them perfect I’ll be farting in your face the whole way home. See how your chrome finish lasts up to that.”

  The girls just shook their heads at him as Roman and the rest of the entourage headed back towards the plane.

  “Um, and us?” the husband of the two stowaways said.

  Roman looked back. “Honestly, I don’t give you good odds at surviving out here on your own.”

  “Really? That’s wonderful. I only play long odds.”

  The wife hit him across the face with her purse.

  Roman added, “If I were you, ma’am, I’d steer him towards Ronin’s people. If they’re as bored as he says they are, they could use a good inveterate gambler. They might just make him tribal chief.”

  The wife nodded, satisfied. “Come along, Rumfeld. That’s the best offer I’m likely to get on your useless hide, here or in any timeline.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Roman landed the Phantom on the warehouse roof of Xardox, the company responsible for the release of the mold that basically spore-bombed DNA-enhanced humans back to the Stone Age. He was in their original time line, only just before the contagion was released on the public. It was the first time his mindcap had allowed him to violate its own rule of no traveling back in time within his own timeline. Clearly it was as desperate as he was to find a solution to the problem of Roman’s ongoing survival as it was to address the global pandemic.

  The girls filed out of the plane, along with Preston and Roman. Roman took in the view of the docks and the container ships coming and going. “Why is it evil bastards always have the best view?”

  He spied the door leading into the factory and the skylight. Opted for the skylight. Dove through the arced glass roughly the size of a six-car garage door. He landed over forty feet below, next to the CEO, Dresden. His landing had sent splinters through the fabric of the cement floor, initially drawing the CEO’s attention away from the more telling elements of this latest plot turn in his life. Namely the Sexy Six levitating above their heads and fanning out in strategic directions.

  Throwing his arm around Dresden’s shoulders, the two men looked up together to see the girls in action. By now Dresden’s people had opened fire on the whole lot of them.

  Vera waved her hand and two of the shooters with assault rifles tumbled from the catwalk into the translucent vat of smart water on the floor below. Using the same telekinetic abilities, Vera levitated down to the vat and put her finger into the water. The nanite-infested smart water, receiving new directives from her, caused the shooters inside the tank to rupture out of their suits as their bodies attempted one failed transformation after another. The chimera shapes alternating from part horse, part lion, part snake to part wolf, part ram, part octopus.

  Dresden gasped and put his hand up to his mouth.

  Vera, not finished with her floor show, sealed the boys up in the tank by touching the smart-glass arcing wall and coaxing it to grow over the water’s surface, making a perfect sphere. Keeping her hands spread wide along the curving surface of the tank, she then shrank it down in size until her hands were literally touching and the sphere was no bigger than a large marble in her hands. She had the crystal ball grow the setting and the chain from it that would allow it to hang from Dresden’s neck. She brought him the piece of jewelry, held the gumball-sized marble up to his eyes, so he could see his people still suffering for all eternity within the transparent sphere. As she strung it around his neck, she said, “I thought you’d appreciate having this memento of the people who failed you when you needed them most.”

  Dresden, his forehead beaded with sweat suddenly, despite the low fifties temperature of the warehouse, his pulse bounding until his veins pulsated to the staccato rhythm of his accelerated heartbeat, smiled plastically and gulped.

  Roman leaned into him and whispered, “The girls are something, aren’t they? Personally, they terrify the hell out of me. Can you give me any explanation for how they do what they do? I mean, levitating, telekinetically sending people flying, warping the fabric of space-time.” He grabbed the marble around Dresden’s neck and gazed into it. The shiver running up Roman’s spine forced him to release it as he shuddered violently. “What was that Arthur C. Clarke said, sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic?”

  With a gesture Roman added, “Oh, and look there. If that doesn’t just creep you out, I don’t know what will.”

  Several of the security guards were sent by Darya with similar telekinetic waves of the hand flying into the glass panes of the factory walls. They looked like flies caught in the webbing of the window frames at first, crisscrossed with so much metalwork. But the smart glass, meant to keep out dust and intruders and stop bullets, repel fires, et al, grew around their bodies and compressed the men and women inside them into two dimensions. They were still alive, just lost to the 3D world around them.

  It occurred to Roman that when Vera shrank the tank to marble size, that the spare nanites had to go somewhere. Evidently they had migrated to the windows and other bare surfaces of the warehouse and felt compelled to use their souped up algorithms to startling effect, bolstering the off-the-shelf nano.

  “I do declare,” Roman said, “it’s turning into one of those stained-glass-riddled Catholic churches around here.”

  Eva waved her hands and sent the remainder of the security team into the exposed steel girders supporting the roof. Their bodies now occupied the same space as the girders, which were now growing through them. “I swear I read this in a book on Tesla once,” Roman said to Dresden. “They called it The Philadelphia Experiment. Think it was done by dialing up those Tesla coils to such a fever’s pitch that the magnetic fields warped the fabric of space-time. Of course that took generators so big they could only be built on a battleship.”

  Preston nodded, standing with his arms folded not too far from Roman. “Definitely related to pulsating magnetic fields. I can feel it.”

  “Well, Dresden,” Roman said, “What’s say we talk?”

  “When do I get to kill somebody, boss?” Preston asked.

  “Hold that thought, Preston.” Steering Dresden towards one of the still-exposed chemical vats of smart-liquid, and looking into it with him, he said, “Now I know what you’re thinking. Just release this into the water supply, and voila, all this Houdini shit comes to a quick end. The world is once again some primitive back water in the universe that couldn’t possibly hold anyone’s interest.”

  “No, no, no!” Dresden insisted. “We just want to make sure that it’s stable enough for a handful of ideas to come to market at a time. Give people a chance to absorb them, so they’re not living in a state of perpetual Present Shock.”

  Roman nodded. “And give the creators of the breakthrough technologies like yourself a chance to profit before having the next new thing come along eroding your profit margins, or worse, before you can even recoup your R&D losses from the last breakthrough.”

  “Yes! Yes!” Dresden breathed easier with Roman’s understanding.

  “Here’s the thing, Dresden. You just have to learn to walk on quicksand like the rest of us. Lower your R&D costs to near zero so no matter if you’re undercut by the competition or not, you can still rebound. Hell, a world full of DNA-enhanced minds pretty much guarantees your R&D costs plummet to next to nothing.”

  “But…”r />
  Roman squeezed him tight at the shoulders. “You realize this isn’t a philosophical discussion, right? Do you know what happens after you release your biotoxin? The entire world shuts down. We’re left with virtual zombies who are more primitive than our cave-dwelling ancestors. Everyone loses, not just you. Now maybe it was just a mistake in your formulas, or another case of nano run amuck with a mind of its own, evolving in directions you never intended…”

  “But…”

  “I know, you’re going to reassure me that you have all sorts of protections against contingencies like that coded right into the smart-water. But here’s the thing, Dresden, I come from the future, where the fact is, none of it helped. And guess what, there were none of those DNA-enhanced minds remaining to rescue us from the situation? The problem you were trying to fix turns out to be the only cure to miscalculations by people like you, determined to rewrite history when they can’t even see the big picture.”

  He nodded feverishly. “Okay, okay. You win. I learned my lesson, I swear.”

  “I believe you, Dresden, I do. But here’s the thing. My people need to kill to vent the rage of their own self-hate onto others just to keep from imploding. Personally, I wish they’d just try a little more self-love, take a Pleiades class, something. But I can’t afford to quell an uprising from my own people while trying to save the world at the same time. You understand, don’t you?” He tapped him on the shoulder. “Preston, he’s all yours.”

  “About time. My skin was starting to itch under this suit.” Preston quit his trying to get comfortable in his own skin and focused all his nervous energy on Dresden. The round-faced Chinese gentleman, who would have been a far more convincing spokesman for The Pillsbury Doughboy, was subject to Preston’s musicianship.

  Moving his hands just like an orchestra conductor, and using his pulsating magnetic coils that wrapped around his surface ever so, like a perpetual fly caught in his own spider webbing, he massaged Dresden’s body. Just as if he was rolling dough. Eventually Preston got him flattened into two-dimensions and draped him like a canvas over the tank Dresden was planning to use to poison the world with. No doubt, Preston managed the stunt with the aid of the gonzo nanites covering every exposed surface after Vera’s sphere-shrinking stunt.