Gorman felt like a fool for hiding his phone from his twin, holding it out in the open, but keeping the screen angled to prevent snooping, as he seemed to know everything he was doing on the cell.
The double got his hand around the neck of player four. It was a thick neck. He found he couldn’t snap it, and he couldn’t strangle the life out of it. The game master did look like he did WWF wrestling to pay for his chessboard of solid gold pieces. “So there are limits to what you can do?” Gorman said.
“Not exactly built to play assassin. That’s not exactly your calling, is it? But I do try to be flexible.”
“That’s good,” Gorman said, watching how the Goliath was holding the twin over his head now, then slamming him down on his knee to snap his back. The twin didn’t look particularly impressed.
“There’s only one reason you could be here,” Gorman said finally. “They’re not trying to fool the wife, they’re trying to fool the company. With a lesser version of me they could have access to corporate intel, plus influence the pipeline of products from a distance, all while minimizing the threat of the competition.”
“Took you long enough,” his double said, voice strained, as he finally got the better of WWF Guy by pulling his balls off and throwing it on the chessboard. As the man doubled at the knees and screamed, the twin gouged out his eyes, then slammed his bald head into the corner of the granite table he had been playing chess on.
By then, Gorman had removed the dick and testicles from the table, thrown it in the bush, restored the board to where the pieces were previously, and made his move. The twin reciprocated with his move, pressing his side of the clock on the table that each of the contestants were using. Neither Gorman nor his double had forgotten about the clocks, managing both sides of the clocks for the deceased now as well as for themselves.
Player number five was blind and deaf, so he wasn’t particularly put off by the show with WWF guy. “Queen takes knight,” the double said, showing the old man what he was doing by taking his hand and holding it over his queen, then over the knight. The old man, smiled, made his move, banged his clock. His neck was snapped in the next second. He never knew what hit him.
“Did they not eliminate the ADHD in your model because they thought it was part of my competitive advantage?” Gorman asked.
“No, just a defect of being a military bot. Out in the field, doing one thing at a time is counterproductive. Even more so than it is in civilian life, these days.”
“Guess that explains how you make a half decent assassin even when you’re not programmed for it.”
“Guess it does. Points for trying to hack your way into my mindchip all this time you’ve been playing chess and trying to figure out who sent me and why. But by now, you know that’s pretty hopeless.”
“Why’s that?” He glanced over the gaming tables. “I seem to be winning at chess.”
“That’s only because you can only see fifty or so moves ahead and retain a few thousand board variations. Makes it easy to sucker you.”
“Well, thanks for not letting me die any more full of myself than I already am.”
“Don’t mention it. Any last words?”
“Yeah, who are you working for?”
His double laughed. “Well, Luderman thinks I’m working for him.”
“Figures, being as his thing is military bots. I guess that means bold preemptive moves are to be expected with that guy. But…”
He didn’t get to finish the thought. His double, in a move reminiscent of a gymnast on a pommel horse, lifted himself onto the table between them, using his hands, and bringing his legs around straight and in parallel, until they had ahold of his neck, before snapping it. Gorman’s last thoughts were, “Should have taken up gymnastics. Probably could have done your job just as effectively from atop the parallel bars, so long as you had a wireless interface between your brain and the internet. One you could have designed easily enough.”
FOUR
Agaton’s wife, Tabitha, entered the lab and strolled toward his work table, outfitted in her power-woman suit, suitable for a COO. Though a man held the title of CEO, because a company that made war machines, it was deemed, was best headed by a male, she was the one who really ran the company. No one was kidding themselves on that score. She cast a weary gaze about the lab, smiling at the other scientists, a kind “thank you for putting up with him,” smile, which they echoed back. Agaton had never actually decoded the silent signal passing between them; he’d just asked her one night what it meant and she was brilliantly forthcoming, as usual. “How are you making out, darling?” Tabitha asked.
“Okay,” he said.
She collapsed on the work stool beside him, and finished her quick survey of the other scientists and techies scattered across the cavernous workspace; there was an ocean of floor space separating them, and the desks themselves were like atolls in the sea. Despite that, there was also no shortage of clutter; the accumulated proceeds of current and prior failed projects.
“You wouldn’t believe what kind of day I had.” Tabitha rested her right ankle on her left knee, took off her low-heel shoe, and massaged her foot. “You should be doing this for me, by the way? Consider it part of your socialization.”
“I’m busy making this anti-tank sighting mechanism responsive enough that it can trigger the cascade of responses that take out a man with a bazooka or anyone aiming at the tank before the person can fire.”
She smiled at him, gave him a kiss on the forehead and said, “I’ll let you off the hook, considering.”
Even if Agaton couldn’t understand his wife’s motivations for loving him, he was pleased with the bio-matrix that they’d provided him from the original Agaton’s brain. From what he could see, he was every bit the genius weapons engineer the original was. It begged the question, if the company that made him could do that, then why didn’t they just make their own superior weaponry? But obviously, having his hands in their opponent’s work suited them even better. Perhaps it kept them from being blindsided. Perhaps it facilitated the close-working interdependency between firms that mitigated all-out competition, and encouraged mergers to minimize on duplicated work. Perhaps they were content to let the rival work on one part of the puzzle while they worked on another, especially when they knew what part the challenger was working on. A spy in their competitor’s midst would also alert his benefactors if owning more shares in the adversary’s company made sense.
“Are you alright, dear? You’re perspiring profusely?”
After a delay as he decided how best to deal with this problem, he said, “I think I may have eaten something that disagreed with me. Give me a second, please.” He rushed to the bathroom where he jabbed a couple pressure points that were meant to trigger fake responses of pleasure during lovemaking, but with the right combination… His chest sprang open like a medicine cabinet. He fished out the defective sensor, tweaked it with the tools he kept in the actual medicine cabinet above the toilet, hidden behind the false back. There, all fixed! He sealed himself back up, made some fake retching sounds for her benefit, then flushed the toilet.
When he came back out, he said to her, “I feel much better now that I got rid of whatever that was inside me causing the problems.”
“Glad to hear it, darling. All right, it’s back to work for me. You take care of yourself, and don’t forget to practice being nice and kind to your coworkers.”
“I will,” he gave her a fake kiss, which she looked disappointed in, evidently being able to tell genuine feeling from what he could simulate. Ah, well. Maybe someday there’d be true happiness for both of them.
***
Bateman paused the footage of the scene they’d just witnessed play out between Agaton and his wife, Tabitha, at Merc Labs. “Well, what do you think?” he said, looking over at Luderman, seated beside him at the video editing table. The station was usually used for doctoring captured video, not watching it raw and in the buff like this, for which its tools were largely o
verkill.
“I think we may have stumbled onto a backdoor and budget approach to taking over the world that can rival Gunther’s big budget and entirely front door approach. Most of these techies and science geniuses are a bit off in the social skills department, whether or not they have Asperger’s. Most people probably get used to excusing their odd behavior early on and stop paying attention.”
“You read my mind. And as you stated before, let Gunther influence the CEOs and boards of trustees of these firms all the wants. If we’re dug into the science departments of one and all, the real power will rest with us. And no one will know we replaced their key human geeks for our robo-geeks.”
“Time for me to show you what I have on Gorman,” Luderman said, handing him the disk. He watched Bateman stick it in and waited patiently for him to cue up the footage.
***
The handsome Gorman appeared oblivious to his effects on the male and female techies alike, many of whom were actively drooling over him, and only listening with what little attention they had left over for what was coming out of his mouth. He pranced throughout the large room filled with engineering specialists at their various work stations, throwing an eye on what they were doing, while simultaneously taking in the many wall monitors surrounding the room. Most of the scientists had earplugs in to blot out the commotion of so many people talking on so many screens at once, which Gorman alone seemed able to process.
A picture of Ken Wilber was up on one big screen, while the computer’s synthetic voice read over his theories on the holographic universe. Other screens had animated 3D illustrations and video of 3D holographic memory matrix technologies under development, with accompanying narrations regarding the ins and outs of how one model worked vis-à-vis the others.
Every so often, Gorman would bend over and lean in to one of the male or female techies, take their mouse out of their hands, or do a hand-over-hand. He would also take over their keyboards, when he finished with the mouse. Meanwhile the young techies would breathe in his cologne deeply, or run their eyes over him while he did whatever he wanted to their work in progress. He was essentially correcting for their mistakes to hurry their part of the puzzle along, taking no notice of their lusting or starry eyed admiration.
From what Bateman could tell, watching the footage of Gorman in action on the monitor from afar, Vision Quest was already several generations further along with its holographic technology than they were when Luderman replaced the original Gorman with their robot analogue. At this rate they would soon have a cyborg whose mind might well be a walking crystal ball able to selectively highlight for his makers everything that existed in the universe. All of this speculation was based on the idea that the holographic theory of the multiverse was indeed real, of course. Bateman was betting heavily that it was.
The security cameras Luderman was tapping followed a couple of the techies out of the cyberlab as they headed to the bathroom. One of them said, “I swear, if I didn’t know better, I’d say Gorman was a robot. No one multitasks that well. Especially not someone in their thirties. Someone in their teens, maybe. They say each generation on line is more riddled with ADHD than the last because it’s the only way to keep up.”
“Gorman, a robot? Please. As social boobs go, there are several of us in that room that have him beat. Conroy can’t pee standing up to save his life, and Gertrude farts every time she gets overexcited or has to do a presentation before the room. And her EQ, not just her IQ, is over 190. No, show me a genius, and I’ll show you someone with their wires crossed.” He pushed the door open to the men’s room ahead of his friend.
“God help me,” Bateman said as Luderman paused the video feed on the two men entering the restroom, “it’s time to stop worrying about how we can market these defective prototypes until we can make better ones, and start perfecting the art of robots in need of repair. I can see the marketing tag line now: ‘Build in your own endearing shortcomings’.”
“It’s a viable niche, especially when you think that Gunther will always be able to outspend us and out-evolve us on the cutting edge stuff.”
“With the exception of your military robots,” Bateman said.
“I’ve been telling you to jump on the specialty marketing bandwagon, but you wouldn’t listen.”
“Well, now that I see it in action for myself, I’m listening now.”
“Let’s not congratulate ourselves on our coup just yet.”
“Why not?”
“We aren’t the only ones looking to do an end run around Gunther as the market leader. Among our secret cabal of advanced robot prototype makers, you can bet our approach has occurred to someone beside us.”
Bateman swallowed hard. “Even so, someone knock him off his throne? Not likely. The best they can hope for is to hold on to their small piece of the market as we’re trying to do.”
“You never know. These days, all it takes is one rogue scientist. Can’t keep your eyes on them all.”
“He can.”
“Let’s hope if such a person is out there, we get to them first.”
FIVE
Jane watched on the monitor as the nanite, no more than an elaborate assemblage of peptides itself, manipulated the complex protein molecule until it found a configuration it liked, just like playing with a Rubik’s cube, albeit one at a microscopic scale. The nanobot then released its creation to do what it was designed to do, infiltrate the cell.
The newly configured molecule breached the barrier of the cell in no time, inserting itself with the cooperation of the cell membrane. Once inside, it quickly found its way to the cell nucleus, passing one inspection after another, by various cellular organelles.
From the moment the miracle molecule entered the nucleus the real fun started. On this scale, only she could interpret what was really going on. Beyond the obvious. The cell was undergoing metamorphosis, but into what? What the long-term repercussions would be...
“Do you believe that?” exclaimed her lab assistant, working halfway around the world, sticking her face in the monitor and interrupting Jane’s show. Despite the acne blotches on the techie’s waxy skin, her twenty-five going on sixteen appearance, she couldn’t help flirting with Jane, and sneaking a look at her over the computer cam every chance she got. Worse, Jane had been put in the unappetizing position of stringing her along to motivate her to keep to the grueling work schedule. A task accomplished with a lot of forced smiles and embarrassed blushing and averting of eyes. Most lab techs who signed on to do postdoc work did so with the understanding of what they were working on and with the chance to make history. Jane saw to it that this techie, like all the other techies Jane entertained virtual reality exchanges with across the internet and across the globe knew nothing of the big picture. Nanotech was still enough ahead of the learning curve to give her lab assistants a head rush, however, working with the puzzle pieces, and never understanding the puzzle they were building. At this stage of the game, they thought the puzzle piece was the whole puzzle.
“It’s so exciting!” the techie said. “Too bad the reaction is so specific to this one cell. We have to expand the influence to cover an entire cell type if we want to doctor entire organs back to health.”
Jane had no such long-term goal in mind; she just let the techie assume what she wanted, again, without discouraging her. “Small steps,” Jane said with a smile. “I’ve got to go now, and check in with the other technicians. Scattered around the world as they are, I have to be mindful of their schedule, not mine,” she added, to soften the blow.
“But we have so much more to discuss!”
“And we always will. That’s the nature of our relationship. We can never get our fill of one another, can we?”
This time the techie blushed, lowering her eyes, looking as if she’d been adequately placated before the rush of excitement overcame her quiet sense of defeat yet again. “Maybe if you assigned me more responsibility! I could oversee some of the other experiments, make sure everyone stay
s on task, and doesn’t waste time chasing up dead ends.”
“I’ll give it some thought,” Jane said. Yeah, right. The sun would have time freeze over first. Compartmentalization was the essence of control. That and an IP address and internet hookup that even the best hacker couldn’t trace down, all set up for her courtesy of the last person who tried flirting with her with the hopes of getting somewhere. He didn’t get far, but he ensured Jane did.
The female techie must have read the lie in her face. “Ah, you’re just shining me on. Why do you have such trust issues! If you don’t let anyone in, you’ll impede progress on your experiment. You’ll have no one to bounce ideas off of. A hundred minds working together makes one very powerful group mind, but they first have to understand the end goal, even as each person in the collective is left to find their own way to it.”
Spoken just like someone from China, Jane thought. For them the collective was always paramount over the individual. And for projects like this, the techie was largely right. Only Jane couldn’t take those kinds of risks. Only one person got to assemble this jigsaw, and that was her.
“I’ll give it some thought, really, I will,” Jane said.
“No you won’t!” the female techie said with a big sigh before just as melodramatically cutting the connection between them in a futile effort to maintain some sense of control. God, Jane hated to play people like this, kind, big-hearted people, just like her, determined to make the world a better place. God knows they got toyed with far too often by people with ends no less nefarious and secretive. That made Jane the bad guy for now in her own story, not the hero. But if her formula worked; that would quickly change.
She buried her face in her hands and groaned. After taking a moment to feel truly awful, she keyed in the next URL on the secure virtual intranet she shared with her techies. It was the sassy, ten gallon hat Texan at bat next, with his cowboy boots, and a day job of milking cows before coming to play post-doc nano researcher for her. Apparently she wasn’t the only one trying to coordinate irreconcilable facets of their personalities in an effort to keep their heads from exploding.
Nano Man Page 3
