She shook her head slowly. “Should know better than to argue with a martyr.”
Red lights were flashing across the sky. “What the hell?” Roman blurted.
“The girls are calling me back to reality. Something important enough to interrupt the one time of day when I brook no interruptions.”
“Better get back then. You know where to find me. I’m not going anywhere.” He brought her in for a kiss, paused to part her hair and fix his gaze on her face as he caressed it. Then he framed her face in both hands in a near vice-grip and squeezed a long, wet kiss out of her. She was gone before the kiss was finished, and the tourists were laughing at him, as if he were hallucinating.
***
“What’s so damn important?” Elsa said, “that you had to cut in on my me time with Roman?” She pulled herself out of the reclining dentist’s chair. Pushed the light out of her face. At least it reminded her of a dentist’s chair. In fact the “light” was a neural stimulation unit. The fact was, she was losing her ability to remember Roman exactly, picture his face precisely, without the chair. She was less and less able with time to find her way into the sims without the chair’s help. Soon, their escape from all realities, not just this one, would no longer be there to offer her solace.
“Roman has popped back into our continuum,” Svena informed her.
Elsa allowed herself a moment of shell-shock. She just didn’t want to believe it all at once. She couldn’t afford to. If the news weren’t true, it’d break her.
As if reading her mind, Svena said, “It’s true, Elsa.” Their minds weren’t synced currently; Svena was awaiting a signal to go ahead with the download.
“Okay, give me the data dump. All of it.” Elsa took a deep breath and braced herself.
***
The girls were standing in arrowhead formation to either side of Elsa. They were all looking out the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall window of her penthouse office at the city beyond.
The district had voted in a new theme. It was one of the many flavors of steampunk worlds. Floating ships and galleons, forged in a bygone era hundreds of years ago and held aloft by giant balloons, creaked across the sky as their wooden parts flexed in the wind. They navigated the air around the “atolls” and “rocks” in the “ocean” that were giant temple-looking pyramids at whose bases spread dense jungle. Some of the conical mounds were actual mountains out of which dragons flew from caves bored into the mountainside. It seemed like no matter what era the district voted in, they wanted to keep their dragons. The dragons, of course, menaced the air ships worse than kamikaze pilots of another era. The air ships were outfitted with flame throwers, trebuchets launching molten buckets of iron, and sonic cannons.
A screensaver probably would have worked as effectively on the smart-windows, but then that wouldn’t have required nearly so much mind power to procure. And these days, there was so much mind power to spare that less audacious projects quickly got forgotten about.
“I’m sorry, ladies, my love of Roman cost us everything.”
The girls smiled ruefully. Some of them teared up. “We’re not ready to give up on him just yet, either,” Galina said. “If the entire timeline dissolves into oblivion with him, it’s not something any of us has a right to complain about. None of us would be where we are without him.”
Elsa used the silence in the wake of the revelation to help her think. “Why do you imagine a present so shockproofed against any possible calamity still has need of enforcers?”
The girls grunted or shifted their weights defensively in turn. “Because people madly following their missions in life have no time to look over their shoulders to keep an eye on the people who could be bothered to fuck with nirvana,” Galina said.
“I’ll take your word for it.” Elsa dug her fingernails into the lats of her crossed arms. “You’re the big picture one.” She sighed. Ceased the acupressure treatment she was doing on herself with her fingernails. “Well, go after him. If he’s playing chief enforcer again, he’s going to need his posse. Let’s hope he’s right about where the answer lies to all our salvation.”
“He’s always been right before,” Svena said.
“Yeah, but is he still the visionary man of peace we once knew, or just the warrior-bitch of his neuronet, content to claim all the heavens for itself?”
They left Elsa’s question unanswered. Dissolving beside her as they teleported to Roman’s new location somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy.
THIRTY-EIGHT
“So, you were out here enjoying the stars and having a smoke before I came along. Why?” Roman said, suddenly growing suspicious about a guy walking a planetoid without much of an atmosphere or any living thing for that matter.
“Needed time to think,” Ethan said.
“You have a DNA-computer in your stomach. What do you need time to think for?”
“Perhaps it’s best if I just show you.”
They had been walking, as far as Roman could tell, nowhere in particular. Any direction seemed as good as any other on this planetoid. He looked for tracks in the ground that could have indicated where Ethan had come from. “You erased your tracks. Ever the environmentally conscious eco-tourist.”
Ethan chuckled as he sucked on his cigarette. “Nanite-infested earth with instructions to keep things in their permanently pristine state. So long as your definition of pristine is a little flexible, I guess you could still call me nature’s little helper.”
“So how many people might you have to kill?”
Ethan did a double-take, nearly snapping his neck vertebrae in the process.
“Come on, Ethan. What else would have you walking a planetoid in the middle of cosmological nowhere, feeling even more lost than you actually are?”
“There are over one million souls in this hollowed out planetoid that I definitely cannot let live in their current state.”
“This thing is hollow?”
“The natural terrain you see over there,” Ethan said pointing to the hills and buttes and mesas. “That’s just to disguise the fact that it’s not natural, it’s dug up. Though I must confess, the project seems damn excusable in light of the added eye-candy up top.”
“What project is that?”
“Like I said, you just have to see it to believe it.”
Ethan stopped not too far from one of the buttes. “Alexa, if you please.”
The “butte” apparently was just some earth covering a goliath-bot. Upon receiving instructions from Alexa, the bot unfolded itself, origami-like. It stood about three times as high as the butte did. With its hands and feet in the shape of giant earth-scoops, it was pretty clear it was one of the sentinels that had hollowed out the planetoid and then went into stealth mode.
“Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to keep this project off the grid,” Roman said.
Ethan snickered. “Yeah, no kidding. Maybe it’s time I gave you a little context. Alexa monitors the mindnet, every thought passing through it, even before the thoughts are sent or received, being as the end-to-end nodes are upgraded humans or AIs whose minds she has already infiltrated.”
“Shiiiit. I guess we’ll be saying Big Sister from now on.”
Ethan ignored him. “So the real name of the game is to figure out how to have end to end transmissions she can’t monitor and to have nodes whose minds she hasn’t infiltrated.”
“So there’s a black mindnet?”
“And it, much as with the old internet, is where the real action is.” Ethan pressed the button on the elevator that would take them down into the hollowed-out planetoid. The elevator shuttle seemed to be little more than a repurposed space elevator. In this case, the car was sliding along the buckyball strand to the bottom from the planetoid’s surface, where normally, it would be taking them from high up in space to the surface. The goliath-bot had gone to sleep over the space elevator to disguise its location and to bar entry to anyone without the proper pass codes.
“So these are like corp
orate intranets of old, where the powers that be can conduct their business unsupervised?”
“Yes, only, each corporation has their own proprietary methods for staying off-grid that it’s not about to share with anyone.” Ethan paused to turn to Roman so he could appreciate his sarcastic expression. “You’re going to just love Woback’s solution to off-grid communications.”
The elevator had stopped and the doors slid open. The ding of the elevator was not too unlike the bell ringing inside Roman’s head signaling he’d finally put two and two together.
“Fuck me!” Roman beheld the Escher-like effect of vertical, glass-walled cylinders running as far as the eye could see in all directions. Each one with a naked human inside.
“Ancient Rome, too, went in for columns in a big way,” Ethan said. “Considering what they did to the Christians, I can only think that this hadn’t occurred to them because the technology wasn’t yet available. I mean, why feed them to the lions when you can just keep them alive and imprisoned forever?”
“What’s going on here?” Roman said, walking the columns and reflexively putting his hands up to the people in the glass cylinders bobbing up and down as if some form of anti-gravity effect was at work inside the tubes.
“They have no consciousness of the outside world,” Ethan explained. “They’re being used as ASIs, not AGIs. Their sole purpose is to monitor mindnet traffic. But they don’t just spy; they analyze, data-mine, look for hidden possibilities, ways to game the system.”
“But as soon as they go to transmit that information, Alexa’s got them.”
“That’s why the information is downloaded to a shuttle that is then fired by laser cannon to the next relay station in the corporate intranet until it finally reaches the corporate execs who will act on the information. Those execs might be upgraded humans. More often than not, they’re ASIs tasked with profit-making. The only reality they know is gaming the system and enhancing profit.”
Roman noticed that the humming coming from each pod in a cavern this large tended to reverberate. The echo made it sound as if the pod people were whispering to one another. The winds blowing through—the chamber was big enough to have its own weather—made haunting sounds as if Homer’s Sirens were needed to maintain the pod people’s trance state. The place was so eerie Roman’s skin was crawling. “Just how many of these relay stations are there?”
Ethan shook his head. “No idea.”
“You aren’t seriously thinking of killing these people? As if they haven’t been through enough already.”
“It’d be better to allow them to awaken to their full potential by making them conscious. Just one of these guys could serve as leadership for an entire solar system of folks who want to live off-grid. Outfit each one of the pod people with a singularity phone that can overcome distance with mini-wormholes for trafficking data, and they might well be able to rule more than a solar system. It’s not exactly the egalitarian age we live in now, but a lot of pioneering folks would be willing to pay the price just to get off-grid, especially if they had one of these guys to back them up.”
“Their parallel-processing abilities that good?”
“Second only to Alexa’s and Elsa’s.”
“You would allow that?” Roman was embarrassed he sounded so surprised.
“You forget, Roman, I’m Daytona born and bred, just like you. I haven’t lost my way. Besides, what threat could people like that be to mindnet? Even if they bucked the odds, Alexa and I live to put down Genghis Khan types who are as alive today as ever, determined to rain darkness down on the world.”
“If I had the girls here, we could awaken them, then the drama can play out as you say. Beats killing the pod people.”
“You called,” Galina said, smiling at him. The girls still hadn’t finished beaming to their location yet, still more holo than real. A few seconds later they’d achieved full density.
They had him off the ground and stretched out like a trampoline before he could object. Four of the girls each had a limb. The other two were peeling off his flexible body-armoring like shelling a lobster. And Svena was already riding his dick. “Girls, you realize I’m a married man, right?” He gasped. “God that feels good.” He ran his hands over Svena. “God, you feel so good. It’s been so long since I’ve touched anything solid.”
Eva saddled him, putting her crotch in his mouth. In between gagging on the vague tapioca pudding taste, he managed, “This is ten different kinds of wrong.” Eva shoved his mouth and his tongue deeper into her by pulling his hair at the back of his head. All he could say was “harder, harder,” which Eva translated perfectly by forcing his head, his mouth, and his tongue even deeper into her.
“You know, for the record, I haven’t had any in a while either,” Ethan said. He may as well have been invisible and inaudible. “Yeah, that’s okay. I can live vicariously.”
He stepped closer to Ethan, looking for a clear line of sight where he might be seen past the girls swarming all over him. “Out of curiosity, when did you get married, Roman?”
No doubt he meant to quell the ferocity of one or another party from devouring each other. But all Roman could think to say was, “It’s possible I just imagined it. I was lost to oblivion for the longest time. A man can go positively mad in there.”
“All right, girls,” Roman said. “Maybe we can table this for later? First get the blood up killing people en masse, per the usual routine?”
The girls seemed to sober some at the suggestion. “We do perform better during angry sex,” Svena confessed. “Venting our self-hatred on one another for all the gleeful slaughter in the mournful aftermath.”
“It is a tried and true formula,” Roman said, beginning to get his breathing under control again.
They finally let him go, standing him up and re-dressing him the way a knight’s squires might in days of old. They each held up a torn section of his flexible body-armor until the nanites at the edges could stitch the remnants back together.
Wiping his still-wet mouth and cheeks with the back of his hand, Roman said, “How did you pull off the teleportation trick? I probably should have asked that the first time I saw you do it.”
“The mindnet can data stream anything, including us. Just have to use the nano in the atmosphere to dematerialize us at one end and rematerialize us at the other,” Darya explained. “Hard to find anywhere within the mindnet where there’s any shortage of nanites to be retasked accordingly.”
Roman smiled. “Nice.”
Galina was stroking the side of one of the tanks. “This is why you require us.”
“Yes,” Roman said. “I need you and the rest of the girls to figure out how to make them fully conscious of the outside world without shocking them into a state of trauma. And ultimately to free them from these tanks so they can take up a new destiny as…”
“Lords and Masters of their own realms,” Galina said. “Yes, we were monitoring your conversation, waiting for the perfect time to materialize.”
“You can do it?” Roman asked.
“Shouldn’t take too long,” Vera and Darya said, stepping up to the tanks. Roman wasn’t surprised, as the resurrection feat seemed to call upon their talents more than the others.
“The rest of you girls can locate the other nodes in Woback’s black net, put them out of commission in the same way?” Roman asked.
“Already have,” Zoya said.
“The time it took for you to have your conversation is like eons to us. Plenty of time for us to parallel-array our abilities to shine a light in the darkness,” Galina advised him.
Roman scratched the back of his head. He was still itching, experiencing aberrant after-effects of being so lost to the void as his nervous system continued to misfire. “I guess that just leaves the matter of how the hell to get them off these isolated rocks in space.”
“Got you covered there,” Ethan said. “The shuttles the company uses to traffic the information, currently powered by laser-cannon, can b
e modified with warp-drive engines that chew through time and space like butter. I can repurpose the landscape nanites on the planet’s surface to manufacture one for each of the encapsulated humans.”
“How long will that take?” Roman asked.
Ethan shrugged. “It’s a geometric curve with most of the time spent in nanite self-replication until there are enough of them to make the warp-drive crafts in the last few minutes. Alexa says, a few hours give or take, depending on how well she does tweaking the self-evolving nanite hardware and software. She’s not exactly engineered for that.”
“We can help her there,” Galina, Zoya, and Darya said at the same time, the girls with the most pertinent specialties already jumping on the opportunity.
“I suppose we can all go a few hours without killing somebody,” Roman said.
“Speak for yourself,” the girls said in sync.
“Try and remember those calming meditations I taught you,” Roman said with an ersatz smile. “I know I will. God, I swear I’m getting as bad as the rest of you.” That just earned him a smile from the girls, albeit an absent one, as they were already fast at work on their latest project.
After penetrating the smart-glass of the transparent tubes with a simple touch, Vera and Darya set about recoding the nanites in the smart-water inside the tanks. Much as they had so many years ago when they took down the Chinese terrorist Dresden who released the zombiefying plague on the world.
The nanites would permeate the minds of those inside the tanks and create the communications channels the girls needed for forging their born-again-solar system overlords. The first pod people to awaken would continue the catalytic reaction, broadcasting the new directives and the new self-empowerment coding directly into the minds of the others.
Roman turned to Ethan. “Tell me what you know about Woback. It was fun back in the day to go in cold, not knowing what the hell we were up against. But I’m guessing these days, even these girls might walk into a situation where they’ll meet more than their match.”
Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents Page 34
