“Wait! Shit, he’s coming toward us,” Punk Face exclaimed, taking a step back from the window.
“You think we should hide?” Pink Panties swallowed hard.
“Shit, no. I want his autograph,” Punk Face replied.
Geezer sighed. “There’s something seriously wrong with the cognitive processes of today’s youth.”
***
“Dude, I so want to be you right now,” Punk Face said, rushing up to Michael the second he and Jane were in the door, and shaking his hand.
“No problem,” Mike said. He let some nanites trail from his body into Punk Face’s and watched him morph into a perfect replica of him. Slow at first, faster as the nanites replicated themselves at a mile a minute. Mike grabbed hold of Punk Face’s girlfriend’s arm, and did the same to her. After the same delayed onset, she now looked exactly like Jane. The nanites had even seen to the matching change in wardrobe and the absorption of the face piercings and tattoos. The transformation of the punk rockers complete, Mike telepathically signaled the nanites in their bodies to self-dissolve, leaving only the originals that had sired them, enough to attend to any additional chicanery that might be needed.
Then Mike looked around at the clientele. Most of them had the sense to be hunkered down back away from the window behind upturned tables or behind the bar, or were just pressed up against the furthest wall they could find. He found the handsomest male and female around his and Jane’s age he could and changed himself and Jane to look like them with the same laying on of hands stunt he’d pulled earlier.
The man whose original face and body he was now using gulped. “Pal, it’s okay. I didn’t like myself that much anyway,” he said, made over as the old Mike.
The new Mike picked him up off the ground and dangled him overhead. “I’m an actor,” the old Mike choked out. “I can get into doing someone else, honestly. No harm, no foul.”
The new Mike snapped his neck. “Michael!” the new Jane shouted.
“He wasn’t lying about being an actor,” New Mike said. “A complete sociopath. Killed his last three girlfriends after sucking their bank accounts dry. Was getting ready to do that to this one.” He gazed over at Old Mike’s girlfriend. She took her eyes off New Mike long enough to stare at the limp body lying beside her. “I knew something wasn’t right about him. Thanks, Nano Man. Can I have your autograph?”
“God, I hate groupies,” New Mike said. He dragged New Jane over to the original, whose body she was now an echo of. Too bad the most handsome devils in the place weren’t together, as it would have saved him some walking.
“Same goes for me, buster,” Original Version said to New Mike, having overheard his crack about hating groupies. “You and girly here want to use me to get your groove on, have at it. I already have a fraternal twin. We’ll say you were separated at birth,” she said, looking at New Jane. “No one will ever question it.”
“God, these people can make up shit on the fly better than professional writers,” New Mike said. “What is it with New Yorkers? Can anyone not get over themselves in four-four time?” New Mike grabbed Original Version by the throat and broke her neck.
New Jane gave him the same acid look as before. He was getting tired of explaining. “She was embezzling from the church group she was working for. I just saved a few hundred homeless people from one cold winter.”
“Who’s going to save me from your latest cold spell?” New Jane said, not wavering in the least.
“Good one. Now, let’s get to hell out of here,” he said. He was looking out the front window and noticing that the various armed force coalitions had overcome whatever stalemate was holding them up and were closing in on the restaurant. Possibly they’d decided to hell with any innocents that got trampled, and to hell with the trampling going out live via the helicopter news teams that had since flown in. All could be mended with the public later with enough spin control.
“What’s the point of all the subterfuge?” she said, as he dragged her out the back way. “You left a room full of witnesses back there to help them see straight through it.”
“Once the armed forces have their hands on ‘Mike’ and ‘Jane,’ I doubt they’ll be asking any more questions. Besides, for whatever the witnesses think of us, you can bet they hate those stand-ins for a police state even worse. That should help keep some mouths shut. That along with the fact that everyone in the restaurant now knows what I know about the two I killed, and realize I was just serving the greater good.”
EIGHTEEN
Serena, the FBI unit director, stared at “Mike” and “Jane” through the walls of their high-tech metal-glass cage, formerly being used as a conference room. The zombies were all trying to get at the imprisoned couple through the glass walls, pawing the glass, hitting their heads against it…
“God, I hate groupies,” Punk Face, who’d been made over to look like Nano Man, said in deference to the zombies. He meant to say, “Get me to hell out of here and away from those zombies before they eat my brains!” But the words didn’t come out that way. Even his voice sounded different, just like Nano Man’s. His body language, everything. No matter how he screamed to be recognized for who he was, whatever was inside him was clamping down on him hard. He had a jailor way worse than the sexy broad Serena staring at him now, and way scarier, which probably explained why he didn’t feel any more threatened by her than “Michael” did.
Pink Panties didn’t look like she was doing any better at breaking free of her internal captor, now that she’d been made over to look like Jane. In fact, she wasn’t paying attention to Serena at all. She busied herself at a microscope stationed on the conference table, and the computer monitors tied to the nanites percolating through their brains and those of the zombies. She seemed obsessed with finding the solution to some quandary only she understood. She and possibly Serena. Every once in a while Pink Panties would get up and mosey over to the glass and stare blankly at the zombies as if hoping to find the answers in them.
“Pink Panties!” he wanted to shout. She’d let him name her after her favorite colored underwear; the only color she wore in fact. He’d let her name him Punk Face out of deference for how generically Punk he looked. Personally, he thought Retro would have been more appropriate, considering Punk rockers were a bit passé. But in all fairness, she had let him name her.
He kept feeling the nanites digging into his brain to make room for themselves. His head felt like a block of Swiss Cheese, if Swiss Cheese had feelings. He would yell out in pain periodically and buckle to his knees. Pink Panties would rush to him, help him up, kiss him, but he didn’t recognize her kisses. She would set him down on the chair, stroke his hair and shoulders and look inwards, lost in figuring out what was wrong with him. Pink Panties knew what was wrong with him!
Could it be that Pink Panties was starting to think she was this Jane she was made over to look as?
***
“Are they actually working for us now?” Mitch said, staring at Jane and Michael from his desk. The sea of desks and worker stations, which included his, surrounded the metal-glass-enclosed former conference room, now serving as both a place to detain and study the Nano Man and his girlfriend.
“Yeah, it’s weird.” Spalding was scratching the back of his neck so hard trying to figure it out he was giving himself a rash. “It’s as if so long as she has access to her research tools and to him, she doesn’t much care what else is going on. I’m not even sure she registers us. It’s like we’re invisible.”
“Maybe it’s some form of PTSD.”
“Maybe.”
“Surely she must know we plan to coopt her ideas for the expressed purpose of global domination, all out subjugation of the masses, the occasional genocide, and probably lobotomizing all people in power not on the payroll and sticking in nano-brains that answer to us.”
“Well, it’s not like we’re hiding the fact that we’re government. So yeah, even self-absorbed Jane has to register that much.”
&
nbsp; “It doesn’t make sense, I tell you. I know her type, hero of the people. She’d do anything to set people free.” Mitch shivered at the thought. “God, can you just imagine, people just doing whatever they wanted, beholden to no God but themselves? Total chaos.”
“Yeah, I wish I could get through to these bleeding hearts that equanimity and equal rights for everybody just means Armageddon. Somehow they don’t get it.”
“We’re being self-deprecating, right? To show a part of us still exists that hasn’t been totally taken over by this Borg-like government agency. We can still get some distance on ourselves.”
Spalding glared at him. “No, man, I’m being totally serious. I can’t believe you’re not.”
***
Serena continued to process what she knew about Michael and Jane, comparing it to these two going through their moves in the “glass house.” There were copious amounts of published articles by Jane online, even accounting for the fact that her most cutting edge stuff was conspicuously missing from the Internet. As to Michael, most of his info was locked up in classified files and redacted. But she’d long ago hacked that and un-redacted the black ink with various cypher algorithms she ran while in hyperthink mode.
Verdict: This was not Jane and Michael. Somehow the originals had cloned themselves using the nano. It was a conclusion supported by just how much nano was in each of the two before her; that is to say, not much at all. What’s more, they seemed to not be evolving, merely carrying out coded instructions which she had yet to hack. She would play along with the ruse for now, see where it was heading. It was the next best thing to having the real guinea pigs in her mitts. Besides, to maintain the illusion, the fakes would have to continue to be convincing, which meant it’d be next to impossible to not give her something.
“Jane” took a break from her lab work and came out of the glass enclosure. She sat down on the steps and caressed the zombie in her arms. It was quite the Sister Theresa number. She teared up as she tried to soothe them, each in turn, with her stroking motions, her tender smiles, meeting their eyes.
***
“She does realize those were the people that only days ago were trying to kill her, right?” Mitch said, fascinated by Jane’s compassion that was spilling over to the zombies, as she took turns giving each of them lap time.
“She’s right, man. Best not to hold grudges. It takes way too much psychic energy.” Spalding nudged him. “Maybe we should get our zombie funk on to get some of that loving.”
“Dude, we’re genius techies with one-hundred-fifty-plus IQs. Try to live the part.”
“I thought I was.”
“Besides, we’re hot for Serena, if you’ll recall.”
“She looks like she’ll survive a little fickleness.”
“You got anything on Talking Head over there?”
Spalding held up the severed head in his hands that had previously been on Serena’s desk before getting his turn with it. “Other than thoughts of going into the men’s room for a quick blow job, not really.”
Mitch grimaced at him. “Brush his teeth first.”
Spalding sprayed Talking Head’s mouth with some Binaca. “Nah, that should do it.” He tucked the head under his jacket that was hanging over the back of his chair and walked towards the men’s room, whistling and looking about to make sure no one knew what he was up to.
Mitch, watching him, just shook his head. “That’s so wrong. Maybe if Mobley had been gay when he was alive. But that’s a clear violation of zombie rights if I ever saw one.”
Spalding shushed him and pushed through the men’s room door. “I guess that’s what Serena gets for working us around the clock,” Mitch mumbled. I lost all impulse control myself twenty-four hours ago. What’s this now, the third time you’ve jacked off right at your desk?
He returned his attention to Jane. He noticed he wasn’t just watching her with curiosity any more. His own eyes were watering. As he went to wipe them, he noticed a few of the other techies were reddening around their noses from rubbing them raw with all the sniveling. Whatever she was doing to him, she was doing to all the others.
***
Serena regarded what was going on in the office. Her socially awkward geek squad which couldn’t have an appropriate emotional reaction to a situation if their lives depended on it was suddenly showing uncanny levels of humanity. They had graduated from the cathartic emotional outpouring at watching Jane doctor the zombies to taking them away from her so they could attend to them like long lost children. Serena went back to her computer to study how the hypnosis was being carried off.
Sure enough, Jane’s studied choreography had been timed with a brainwave signal being given off by the nanites. Even, Michael, standing there, flexing and releasing that new arm she’d grown back for him, was doing so in a way that was analogous to Mesmer swinging his pocket watch before a crowd.
If Serena had any sense, she’d stop this experiment now, destroy the source that was humanizing her crew. Incinerate “Mike” and “Jane,” and the zombies and the animated artifacts in their peculiar museum exhibit, one and all. That was the last thing she needed was to have her people grow a conscience. Bleeding hearts didn’t make for good government types. But she was curious herself to see just how corrosive the nanite effect was. Could just a bottle full of these things, less than a kid could collect rounding up fireflies in the yard, be enough to turn humanity around? Start some kind of ripple reaction? If she could get at how they were doing it and why, she might be able to apply lessons learned to evolving herself in whatever direction she chose. There was one very effective weapon being deployed here, moreover, for the person with the eyes to see. One that might well be turned to working its magic for her when the time was right. If humanity could be spread like some virus, then so could fear, paranoia, depression, and whatever else gave her kind a better hold over the masses.
NINETEEN
“What in the name of God went on here? These terrorists, they know New York is bankrupt, right? They couldn’t pick on some city with an actual cash surplus?” The mayor kept padding his face with his handkerchief to mop up the perspiration; it was like trying to hold back Niagara Falls with a teaspoon.
His obesity didn’t help, nor did trying to make himself less rotund inside of a suit two sizes too small for him. Maybe if the mayor had kept himself lean and fit like him, also in his fifties, or at least lean, Cronos thought, casting his eyes on his mangy underfed looking techie sidekick in his twenties, nibbling absently on his long, scraggly hair.
To be fair, the sight of Times Square tore up like this, from right on site, would make any city politician, far less the mayor, with a weak heart, reach for their nitroglycerin tablets.
“No insignias on any of the armored vehicles. The ones on the uniforms are bogus. Boy Scout merit badges mean more.” Finelli, their tech guy, kept working the camera angles in the vicinity, and chewing through the video footage of the holocaust scene enacted earlier.
“What about this Nano Man at the center of all of it?” Mayor Welsh asked, his voice partly muffled by the handkerchief passing over his mouth.
“You let me worry about him, Mayor,” Cronos said.
“Do you even have the clearances you need to chase these guys down?” Welsh asked. “You work for me, not the President.”
“The President wouldn’t be able to help. These are corporate types that went after this guy which is why they covered their tracks so well. Unless I miss my guess, the footage we’re looking at will be disappearing shortly as well.”
“It is,” Finelli said, hacking away at the keyboard slung from his neck like a kid’s electronic piano; even his keystrokes seemed to match that of a would be concert hall impresario. “I backed up the footage into my hack-proof black box, but these guys tore through it in under five minutes. God, they’re good. No offense, but I might just switch sides.”
“They’d just kill you for what you know, Finelli,” Cronos said, lighting up a cigarette.<
br />
“Good point.” Finelli grunted. “You can’t buy loyalty these days, except with revelations like that.”
The mayor excused himself, ducking into the back of his limo. Finelli and Cronos watched him drive off, waving with mock adoration. “Who put that idiot in charge of a city?” Finelli said. “My dog has a higher IQ.”
“I’m guessing that’s the point. Easier to pull his strings. Who needs a dog that bites the hand that feeds them?”
“If that’s true and he’s in bed with the corporate types, shouldn’t he be ordering you off the case instead of giving you the green light?”
“Have to keep up appearances of separation of public and private spheres, just like the appearances that there’s actually checks and balances in government between the judiciary, the legislature and the senate, you know, the way it’s supposed to be. So we can all go on pretending the corporate types don’t own everybody who’s in any position to do them harm.”
“Yeah, whatever. Don’t cloud my mind with that political shit, Cronos. You know I don’t give a damn. So long as I’m free to play with my toys and do what I love, don’t much care who rules the world. They could hand it over to aliens, for all I care.”
“Or nano men, as the case may be,” Cronos said, thinking.
“Where do you want me to start?”
“Let’s start with which corporations were behind this. Let’s see what’s cooking up inside their labs. Too early to pick sides. Might be best serving one of them.”
“Seriously? I thought you were sworn to seeing every last one of them go extinct like the giant, oversized dinosaurs they are.”
“I’ll settle for siding with the least oppressive global dominator of them all for right now. Maybe their nano-tech is less scary than Nano Man’s, with more upside than down side.”
“You really believe that?”
“No, but even corporations are forced to change global domination strategies from time to time. Who’s to say there isn’t more profit to be made making people smarter and better versus keeping them fat, dumb, and lazy? Might be harder to keep a rein on them, but then who else is going to be bright enough to build your future for you? And if you’re taking ten percent off the top of whatever upgrades they order for themselves, you still remain in charge, forever richer and more powerful than anyone else. If the only way anyone has access to the future is through you, why slow it down and try and keep it from happening? Why not bring it on in force?”
Nano Man Page 15
