Time Bandits (Age of Abundance Book 1)

by Dean C. Moore

  “You know we could just let the Citywide AI find our next cases for us, ensuring both maximum interest and engagement in the case, and maximum chance of getting over ourselves in the process. She can balance those competing goals nimbly.”

  “Yeah, right. And subject ourselves to the most cleverly conceived Big Brother regime in the history of the world? The one in which we get our minds messed with, and manipulated to the point where we can’t even recognize ourselves, all without voicing a single complaint because we’re so convinced it’s for our own good?”

  “Well, when you put it like that…”

  “The reality finally dawns on you. If I’m going to follow some god’s bidding, it’ll be the one I was taught to follow in Catholic Church, not this false god.”

  “Fine. For you to embrace all my New Age stuff, something you’d rather claw your eyes out than do, I’m guessing you’ve given the matter enough thought for there to be no arguing with you.”

  He donned his helmet, strapped it in under his chin. As he idled the motor, he shouted to her standing by the car immediately behind him, “You think there’s a parallel timeline where the two of us, lacking the same issues with authority, actually trust the City and planetary AIs to guide us?” When he didn’t get a response, he checked her expression in his rearview mirror. There was a look of complete horror across it. He smiled as he drove off into the latest slipstream threatening to warp his sense of time and space.

  Kendra climbed in the next car that her father had brought out. “You’re not going to try and talk me out of this anymore?” she said, looking up at her father.

  “I hate to say it, but the idea of a suicidal daughter appeals to me more than the idea of a homicidal daughter. You never could forgive me for what I did to you as a child.”

  “You’re not the only one softening in your old age, Dad,” she said, before speeding off.

  “In that case, try and survive this!” he shouted after her. Then, mumbling more to himself, he said, “I must be benefitting from all those parallel universes we exist in where we actually work out our shit.” He took out a joint and kissed it. “If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have any firsthand knowledge of parallel universes.”

  ***

  Torin zigged and zagged through the Formula 500 traffic, all moving at a dizzying pace about the track. He hated to admit it, but Kendra was right; he was finding the life and death stakes combined with the split-second responses necessary to keep him alive from one moment to the next strangely calming and centering.

  He was so lost in what he was doing he hadn’t noticed himself slipping into the trance. And so when the first image to pop into his mind was of being run over, entirely flattened by the storm of smooth wide tires of the Formula 500 vehicles blowing over the track, it jarred him, despite being not entirely incongruous.

  His flattened, two-dimensional self-peeled off the tarmac and staggered forward, turning sideways to squeeze between two cars breezing by that left little room for anything but his paper-thin body.

  The next car caught Paper Thin Torin up in its wheels, wrapping him around the front left tire before spitting him out to the rear left tire and finally up and out, shooting him against the side panels of another Formula 500 car; he must have looked like another decal at that point. Torin rubbed the images out of his eyes and refocused his attention on his driving.

  He barely made it another lap before the strange images began intruding on his mind yet again. The same two dimensional version of himself showed up in a flag overhead of the stadium when he looked up. As an oil slick he had to steer around to keep from spinning out. Finally the decal versions of himself came peeling off of one Formula 500 car after another, plastering themselves up against his vehicle, held there by the wind pressure. Fight to peel them off how he may, they soon blocked the windshield, leaving him no recourse but to slow and take himself off the track.

  After arriving in the pit area, he jumped out of the car, and gasped for air. Kendra drove in behind him and hopped out of her vehicle. “What’s the matter?” she said.

  “Nothing. Your solution for communicating with the Cosmic Consciousness was sheer genius. Come on. I found us our next case,” he said, taking her by the arm and running off with her.

  Her father shouted after them, “Appreciate you not killing anyone, yourselves included—figured I’d throw that last part in there just to be nice.” He sighed as an assistant mechanic came up to him with a clipboard. “Let’s hope one of my riders actually wins now that the wild cards have been removed from the deck. I guess it’s back to straight poker without any of the cheats.”

  EPILOGUE 2

  “What’s this traffic jam all about, huh?” Torin said. “I feel like a bug trapped in amber.”

  She got a load of the speedometer, which said one-hundred-ten miles per hour, and the snaking course he was following around the other motorists, moving somewhere between seventy and ninety miles per hour. “We’re not on the Formula 500 speedway anymore,” she said, “just in case you’re experiencing post traumatic flashback.”

  “Very funny. They really do need to pass a law forcing people to work from home. All this roadway congestion really is quite annoying.”

  She smiled despite herself. “So what has you so worked up?”

  “A vision of me flattened along the roadway, getting up, walking around in two-dimensions, a little punch drunk, but otherwise none the worse for wear.”

  “A cartoon version of you? Just when I thought you couldn’t embrace your inner child anymore without getting into a time machine.”

  “I think I know what it means. Why I was shown that image just then.”

  “Why?”

  “I asked myself, how can I be walking around in two-dimensions and not dead? I suppose these days it could be any number of reasons. But the one that popped into my head was drinking a nano-cocktail, swarming armies of microscopic robots, designed to make me virtually indestructible and everlasting.”

  “As opposed to your typical gene enhancing cocktail?”

  “Like I said, could be any number of reasons for the vision, not the least being I was probably terrified out of my mind at the time and was certain I was going to get run over.”

  “But you’re sure this scenario out of all the other possibilities is right because…”

  He jagged right on the wheel, just barely missing the latest motorist. “Look at the license plates of the cars every time I’m forced to slow down and match the speed of another vehicle before being allowed to plunge ahead.”

  She did. They read, in order, as she verbalized one plate after another in her head: NAN-O. NANOMAN-2. NANO-FAB 33. “Maybe we’re passing by a nanotech firm and these are just their employees getting on shift, or coming off.”

  Torin pointed to the billboard. “Nano Farming. The future of Food.”

  “It’s the nanotech age. The biotech age. The Space Age. The Diamond Age. Depending on who you’re listening to. And you’ve got nano on the mind, so you’re automatically filtering out all the other stimuli. This is not synchronicity, or the Cosmic Consciousness talking to you telling you, ‘You’re on the right track.’ This is just viewer bias.”

  “Fine, you take over the driving. I’ll close my eyes so as not to prejudice what you’re looking at. You tell me what you see.”

  The car morphed a steering wheel out of the dashboard for her, turning the passenger seat into the driver’s seat, so he could recline and go to sleep where he was in the two-seater speedster, after, of course, the steering wheel recessed into the dash on his side, and the power pedals on the floor, granting him more leg room and room to recline the seat. The car’s AI, monitoring their conversation, hardly needed to be coached.

  She made use of the newly formed accelerator on her side and the steering wheel to take them off the freeway and into the nearest town. If they were in Nano-Ville, a gas station attendant ought to be able to tell her.

  She got out of the car at the pump, p
lugged in the cord. Actually the car sensed the pump and plugged itself in. Speaking to the gas pump, she said, “Any nanofactories around here? Nano-related enterprises at all?”

  “No, ma’am,” the pump AI said. Its tinny, slightly dislocated voice coming from its speaker sounded personable and genuine all the same. Like a teenager taught to mind his manners.

  “Thought so.”

  “Still, it’s possible he’s right about the synchronicities.”

  “Come again?”

  “Reading his mind, ma’am. You’re within my range. Part of the full service experience. Some drivers are too tired and don’t feel like talking by the time they get here. Can barely string two thoughts together. So I help them to connect the dots.”

  “Why do you think he’s not imagining things?”

  “Because NanoFab, Inc. just announced today The Total Makeover. A breakthrough sparked by its alliance with Bio-Farma and Hive Minds Are Us. Once injected with the nanococktail you will be, just going down the list of the first four items: 1. Immortal; 2. Immune to Injury; 3. Able to shape-shift with few real limits; 4. One hundred percent insured against wrongful misuse of such technology, courtesy of the supervising City and Regional AIs, and ultimately the Planetary AI, if you travel globally. Essentially, morphing ability is shut down if the intended application to which you wish to apply it is illegal or simply not sanctioned by the mega-mind AI in charge.”

  Kendra took a deep breath, held it as long as she could to see if she could possibly bottle up her anger, before letting it out. “So, basically there would no longer be any separation between us and the various AI group minds?” She was ranting, pacing, and gesturing, and just vaguely aware of all three affectations. “There would just be one complex system of systems, all interacting at various levels, all intermeshed, with the group minds in the roles of the organs, and we humans and lower order life forms in the role of the individual cells? All comprised of biotech bits that are self-perpetuating, ever-renewing, reacting to and informing one another?

  “And once part of this bigger system-wide brain, this distributed intelligence, we can never fully understand, we would just be whatever vehicle it needed to carry out whatever mission at any given time? Not our own individuals with our own agendas but its eyes and ears, its hands, its tools? And me thinking George Orwell’s take on the future was prescient, if a bit one-sided!”

  “Sorry, ma’am. Not rated for philosophical speculation. Just to get you where you need to go with a minimum of effort from you.”

  “That’s quite, okay,” she said, unplugging the car from the quick charge. “Because something tells me where I’m going is going to require maximal effort.”

  She climbed back in the car to find Torin snoring away. “You multitasked that conversation while you were sleeping?”

  “Of course,” he said, before resuming his snoring.

  “So, where to next, you think?”

  “You should probably wait until I’m awake to ask me that.”

  She made a sour face and sped the car away from the gas station.

  Once back on the freeway it was her turn to play demon speedster, slipping and sliding between cars that felt stalled by comparison.

  “I feel compelled to tell you that the tires on this car aren’t rated for this kind of performance,” he said before returning to his snoring, and before hearing more rubber peeling against the asphalt. “I suppose it’s just as well the roads are self-repairing courtesy of the genetically engineered bacterium that converts sunlight into tarmac.”

  “All this time you were talking in your sleep, I forgave the inane prattle because I thought you were disturbed, like the rest of us. I didn’t realize you never stopped multitasking.”

  She braked so hard that the air bag deployed on his side. “I appreciate the pillow, but I’m awake now,” he said, trying to stuff the thing back into its compartment. “It’s not like you to jump to conclusions,” he said.

  “Jump to what conclusions?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, managing to get the last of the airbag back inside its prison hold, “try the fact that we’ll be any less than what we are just because our bodies are supporting upgraded technology. The hive mind nanococktail is simply a self-repairing mix. Even the shapeshifting is arguably an extension of that. Never know when you have to crawl out from the bottom of an upturned car as an oil slick. I’m seeing all upside here.”

  “You would, Mr. Age of Abundance isn’t just about new technological wonders coming at you faster than you can blink, it’s really a religion, Guy, because he can’t get any objective distance on it at all.”

  “What makes you think we’re any less programmable or prone to suggestion now, should the City or Planetary AIs take it upon themselves to implicate themselves into the cracks of our consciousness?”

  “The fact that we’re so incorrigible, for starters. We can barely program ourselves to do what we want. We’re stubborn, dense, prone to all sorts of self-destructive behaviors. It’s as much protection from our own foibles as from Big Brother’s plotting and scheming.”

  “Fair enough, but look around. Everything’s moving faster and faster. How long can any of us deal with any of it without upgraded nervous systems and minds that think at the speed of light? Like it or not we’ve bought into perpetual upgrades just as if we were the next edition of Windows Office we’re all so addicted to. And yes, the irony that we have to pay for our own upgrades by letting the inventors take their ten percent off the top of our enhanced money making potential doesn’t elude me, particularly when it’s married to the idea that we’re all the more impressionable with each upgrade.

  “But with new advantages comes new risks. A greater future means greater responsibility, to ourselves and to one another. Particularly to be more self-aware and aware also of the subtext lurking behind each new invention or accompanying social phenomenon.”

  “So you’re not disagreeing with me? You’re saying I’m right but that’s just the way it is, none of us can do anything about it?”

  “I’m saying glass half full or glass half empty psychology, nothing much has changed on this level in the last several thousand years. There’ll always be someone looking to use the same tech you rely on to get over on you, enslave you to their hidden agendas if they can’t cajole you and win you over by subtler methods. And you’ll always be struggling to be free of that oppression with increased mindfulness.”

  “Only, it’s not human minds working in concert plotting and scheming against the little guy anymore, it’s some uber-intellect working so much faster on so many more levels that we haven’t got a chance.”

  “Nietzsche said it best. The slave must know the master a lot better than the master must know the slave. That which seeks to oppress thus ultimately liberates better than any other force on earth. Because the person who has the most information on the other party is ultimately in the position to do the most with it. The same way they say the masochist in an S&M relationship is the one really calling the shots.”

  “Sorry, Torin, just not the pacifist, sit around and do nothing type because God has everything well in hand.”

  “I didn’t say that. I got my vision for a reason. The reason suggests to me that we are meant to intercede. That it’s our mission in life, at least until we get the next one.”

  “Why is it I feel that the issue now is not whether or not I can remain a pacifist sitting on the sidelines and refusing to intercede, but whether the Planetary AI can do that? I guess we’re about to see how much more vested She is in this reality versus all the probable alternate realities she’s juggling.”

  “I imagine the closer we get to NanoFab, the more we’re going to find out.”

  EPILOGUE 3

  Kendra stared up at Nano-Fab’s impressive building, in size at least, in bearing it was about as unassuming as you could get in a building, a faceless cube you either didn’t notice to begin with or tried to put out of your mind the instant you did. “How
did we get here?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a bit of a blur.” Torin craned his head every which way to make sure no one was coming up on them from any direction in the parking lot.

  “I guess the brakes giving out was our first clue.”

  “Could have been your driving catching up with you. You know, the karma police as opposed to the planetary police?”

  “It’s not like me to lie to myself.”

  “Sometimes lies are comforting.”

  “Especially considering the alternatives,” she mumbled. She was quite sure it was the City AI cueing them that they were headed down the wrong path with their latest investigation when the brakes on their speeding car gave out. “Wrong” path as in the City AI was more vested in Nano-Fab’s take on the future than in theirs.

  “Don’t let the uber-mind intimidate you. In the final analysis she’s a collection of wires and electrodes.”

  “Or whatever she’s using for flesh and bone these days.”

  They looked at one another to see if they were ready to go any further, got the same, ‘I’m no more sure about this than you are’ expression reflected back at them, followed by cold, steely resolve.

  They walked in sync, covering for each other’s blind spots. The few vehicles moving were clearly just late arrivals to work. The people strolling from their black and neutral colored business sedans paid them no mind. No sign of security, the human or the robotic kind, which she would think would be plentiful, even on a calm day when someone wasn’t trying to blow Nano-Fab off the map. “I don’t get it,” Kendra said. “Looks like another day at the office.”

  “Maybe the city AI is just waiting for us to lose our nerve. Not like there’s any rush. I mean, what would it take for Her to do us in? A gnat sized droid flying into my ear canal and blowing up inside my brain? I’m probably covered in the little buggers right now.”

  “A patch of black ice that causes us to slip and fall, timed perfectly with a car backing out. Most are auto-piloted, not like drivers actually check their rearview mirrors anymore.”