Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents

by Dean C. Moore

  They threw him onto a bean bag on stage and took their seats in the tiered seating of stacked bales of hay throughout the barn.

  And he began his sermon on the mount, pulling it out of his ass as he’d always done. “There’ll be rogue galaxies where the worlds’ peoples will toy with the laws of physics, running experiments that aren’t allowed inside mindnet for fear of taking down the grid. But these explorations will be necessary to see that mindnet continues to expand across the cosmos into regions it can’t yet penetrate.”

  “Hate to break it to you, pal, but that’s yesterday’s news,” one of his hecklers said. Apparently they hadn’t exactly gotten up and left the commune while he was away.

  “Seriously?” Roman said, his voice straining with incredulity. “Well, I suppose I have been gone a while… Have I ever told you about the day when we…”

  “…travel back in time to start seeding our own splinter timelines, tending the multiverse as if it were our own garden with these new seedlings?” another heckler said.

  “Already happening,” said yet another heckler.

  Roman had forgotten they could read his mind now with their souped-up DNA-minds and whatever other nanotech they’d evolved to saturate the atmosphere to keep a tight lid on their own mindnet, away from the snooping eyes of Alexa. His people would always be of that camp, the no Big Sister allowed camp.

  He laughed. “All right, you tell me then. What all have I missed out on that I had prophesized would happen?”

  They started talking over one another until they figured out how to police themselves. “Mars’s moon has been turned into a theater of limited warfare to test out cutting-edge battle tech that might be used against aliens choosing to penetrate mindnet.”

  Roman made a sour face. “Not one of my favorite predictions.”

  The crowd laughed.

  “Wormhole surfing has replaced surfing Malibu as the sport de rigueur for extremists,” said another spectator.

  That remark earned some claps. “I was drunk when I said that,” Roman said, pleading his case.

  “We thought we’d torture you with the stuff you never wanted to see happen first,” one of them said. “Consider it your initiation back into the community.”

  There were laughs all around.

  Roman was happy to see his disciples had all grown up and gone out to preach the gospel according to Roman. No doubt many of the breakthroughs they weren’t just reporting, they’d created themselves, in his name.

  He pretended to be into the ritual for their sakes, but the truth was his laughs were made of plastic. He had instructed his neural-net to wall off a place for him to think in peace away from their mind-hacks to help hide the truth. No doubt it was a pocket outside of space-time the neuronet and it alone had access to.

  The fact was, Roman just wasn’t truly home anymore, and was beginning to wonder if he ever would be again. He glanced over at Elsa and realized their positions had reversed. It was she who was lost to the Daytona vibe, and he who couldn’t quite believe in it anymore.

  “Why,” he asked himself? He guessed he knew it was on account of those one million multiverse men out there. They might be the second generation on line, but it was still too early for all the kinks to be worked out in the making of a true multiverse man.

  That meant one day Ethan would call him back to duty again. To solve what only he could solve. To be the true guardian of forever.

  He wanted to believe such thoughts were just on account of his messiah complex. His need to be so central to an egalitarian age that, by definition, didn’t need him to save it anymore. It was more than capable of saving itself.

  And yet he couldn’t shake that feeling.

  His neuronet had been the first. Maybe of all the ways it could have been busted, it was busted just right. And so the king and queen who were now so wrong for this age were so right for it on account of it.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  So much research goes into even a highly speculative book of this kind. As much as you’d be tempted to believe it’s all imagination, it’s not. To this end I’m indebted to far too many souls to name. But the short list would have to include:

  Those witting and unwitting souls who share their work so freely on the internet. In particular, those folks whose discoveries or reportage thereof weighed heavily in granting my prose that extra realism factor.

  My primary Facebook newsfeed folks who keep their nose to the ground for all breaking technology news, especially those pertaining to the transhuman era. Gareth John, Marco Santini, Sergio Tarrero, René Milan, Louisa Baqués, chief among them, but there are literally hundreds of others.

  And, of course, to the many transhumanist Facebook groups to which I belong, whose mind-trust is invaluable. Not just for the sharing of great intel, but for the willingness of all participants and experts in their fields to answer questions.

  And last but not least, to my loyal beta readers, and to my writer’s circle. They help me to get outside of my own head and help to illuminate all my blind spots when it comes to editing and fact checking.

  That said, all errors are entirely my own. As the buck stops with me.

  AFTERWORD

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