But something deep down told him his version of utopia wasn’t going to play any better than anyone else’s.
THIRTY-SEVEN
“So, what will we do to pass the time on the flight over, I mean, considering the plane can fly itself on autopilot?”
Serena turned a leery eye to Photon. “What do you suggest?”
“Sex. It’s the perfect thing to keep from cramping up in the tight confines of this plane.”
“I don’t cramp up.”
“Well, I do. Consider it then not so much sex as sex therapy for all my aching joints.”
“You can’t be aching yet. We just got on board.”
“Okay, then, what would you like to do until you’re something more than a pain in the ass.”
“I usually entertain myself datamining the internet.”
Photon made a pained face. “Really? Isn’t that a bit dry?”
“Not if you want to expand your mind in a hurry.”
“But if you grow your mind ahead of the rest of you, you’ll be all out of balance. Evil people don’t start out evil, you know? They get that way because they didn’t develop their hearts along with their minds. They may have neglected all of their senses, like smell and touch, just to name two, until they’re marooned inside their heads and can’t help but think twisted stuff all cut off from humanity like that.”
She thought about what he was saying. “Makes sense.”
Serena engaged the plane’s autopilot, leaned over and sniffed him. “You smell like moldy socks and dead skin.”
He frowned. “It’s an aphrodisiac for humans. What else do you smell?”
After taking another whiff, she said, “Anxiety. Muscle tension.”
“You can smell muscle tension?”
“Yes, a relaxed body smells different than a tense body.”
“See, I told you I needed loosening up, but you wouldn’t listen.”
She hoisted him off the seat. “Easy!” he shouted. And she walked with him to the small cargo bay and set him down between her legs. “Ow! What are you doing?”
“Massaging your shoulders to get rid of the tension.”
“No, you’re breaking my bones. Ease up, will you? I think you were right to hold off on the sex until you got your touch under control. I could be dead already.”
She snapped his neck as he yelped and twisted his spine this way and that, listening for the pops. He winced and said, “I think you might have accidentally engaged your kill-mode.”
“These are chiropractic adjustments I just downloaded from the internet.”
“Will you stop with the downloading already? Can’t you, you know, just improvise from what you already know? Otherwise you’ll never be fully in the moment. You’ll always be partly somewhere else, which asides from not being particularly enlightened, going off what I’ve read, makes me feel kind of jealous.”
Serena stood them both up and disengaged from him. She closed all her fingers but her index finger in each hand. “Um, what are you doing?” he asked.
“You wanted to make beautiful music together?”
“What, you get that off your analogy rolodex?”
“I will play you like a piano.” She jabbed her fingers at his pressure points, discerning the perfect combination to prepare him for lovemaking.
“Will you stop trying to kill me!” He picked himself off the floor and felt about his body. “Hmm, that does feel better somehow. I don’t get it.” When she started to explain he held up his hand, “but that’s okay, I don’t need to. For your information, sex can be just as effective at relaxing the body.”
“But to make love properly you need to first be relaxed.”
His eyebrows went up. “You’ve got me there. Have we progressed that far already? I thought we were still at the lusting for one another stage.”
“I’ve done exhaustive research on the subject of love in the last few seconds in hypermind, and it seems that for it to work at all the lover must do most of the work fantasizing and projecting. The love object has very little to do but act ambiguously enough to encourage the lover to perseverate on the meaning of such ambiguous actions. Once the lover can think of nothing else in his mad determination to figure out the puzzle, the chronic hypersecretion of hormones locks in the addiction, which you then call love.”
“I can tell you’re a diehard romantic.”
“The good news is I can stuff years of doting over you into seconds to move this relationship along in record time. We are further blessed by the fact that your every action is a bit ambiguous being as your body and your mind aren’t entirely under your control. And because you have no clear objectives and goals in life. Beyond making an impression on the world, which is sufficiently vague to not betray too much. In short, we have the perfect formula for falling in love.”
“You do, maybe, but what about me? Where is all this ambiguity for me?”
“I can download a new personality every couple of days if you like. That should send you sufficiently contradictory signals until you’re positively mad for me.”
He sighed. “Maybe we’re trying too hard at this. Instead of starting up in our heads, why don’t we start with simple touching, let those hormones do their work, and revise our thinking and feeling accordingly? You do have the equivalent of synthetic hormones, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then, problem solved.”
She allowed herself to be touched by him, and she permitted him to take the lead, ignoring his nervousness and awkwardness. “How am I doing?” he said, kissing her and undoing her shirt, and handling her breasts.
He was doing terribly, so she lied. “Fine.”
“I told you we’d be great at this.” He continued to bend over, curling inward from the top of his head like a mealy bug in an effort to reach further down her chest with his mouth. But then he cried out and rushed his hand to the back of his neck. “I’m cramping up,” he said. “I just gave myself a Charlie horse.”
This is where she usually smiled condescendingly. Instead she scanned him. “Your electrolytes are off. You must have gotten too sweaty and excited seeing me throwing those other guys around. Now we need to get fluids into you.”
“Yours would be fine, honestly.”
She smiled this time; she couldn’t help herself. “They will not right you.” She clambered up, buttoned up, and took the plane off of autopilot.
“Speaking of electrolytes, just how far are we from a tall glass of orange juice?” he said, continuing to rub himself and making more wincing sounds.
“I did have the foresight to commandeer us a jet. So we’re not as far as we would be if we were in a propeller plane.”
“That’s my girl, always thinking ahead.” He mumbled, “Now if we can just get her to think about the here and now a little better.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
“I think you better take a look at this,” his on-site computer guy said in his in-ear mike. Luderman, reclining in quiet repose on his bed, fully dressed, darted up off the bed and into the surveillance room down the upstairs hall. “What’s this? I told you to expand the radius about the house. But you can stop short of China.”
“Be patient,” his hacker said, used to his outbursts, and refusing to take his eyes from the monitor he was pointing to, one of many in the room.
“What is that?”
“A downed telephone pole, lying right across the road.”
“And I care about this civic service announcement because…?”
“Wait for it.”
Luderman watched the man in the black Mercedes get out, survey the situation, check behind him on the road for approaching motorists. He then checked in the opposite direction. Convinced no one was coming, he picked the telephone pole up and launched it like a javelin out of the way, then climbed back in the car. “I’ll be damned,” Luderman said. “Is that one of my security guys?”
“Not exactly.” The hacker zoomed the image for him and freeze-framed it. H
e then enhanced it.
“Bateman!” Luderman shouted. “All this time I’ve been plotting and scheming against Gunther alongside him, only to find out he’s one of Gunther’s robots!” He rubbed the back of his neck and looked inwards for his next move. “Gunther isn’t just replacing key people in competitors’ firms, he’s going after the Camp Futura alliance itself. That’s crossing the line.”
“I’ve been monitoring your replacements, yours and Bateman’s. There’s no indication that Gunther knows anything about them. Besides, why would he risk showing his hand before he’s replaced every last one of you, yourself included?”
“A very good question,” Luderman said.
“I think Bateman is acting on his own, at least with his little side project with you.”
“To what ends?”
“Who knows? Maybe Gunther made them too high functioning. So if their agendas conflict with Gunther’s, they’re left with no other out but to find ways to make both parties happy.”
“This could work for us. If these things are smarter than he is, they may well be able to work around him better than any spies we could surround him with. And all we need to do is appeal to their transcendental logic with agendas that are more appealing to them.”
“How do you plan to do that?”
“By first getting to know them better. That’s where you come in. Amp up the surveillance of all the Camp Futura members. See if you can tell which ones are still human, which ones aren’t…”
“Got you.”
Luderman exited the control room. Once downstairs, he paced the marble floor of his lavish estate home, biting his fingernails, his posse of human-looking robo-guards just a couple arms reach from him, drawn by his high anxiety state away from whatever other security duties they were attending to. They would have been monitoring the conversation between him and his chief hacker, which meant they already knew about Bateman, and the fact that Luderman was actively considering workarounds. “When was the last time we hacked into Gunther’s computer system?”
Damon, one of the robo guards, shook his head. “Relax, boss. That pipeline never stops flowing. The instant he updates we know about it.”
“And you’re sure he has nothing more powerful than you guys?”
“Not a chance. You handle most of the DARPA projects anymore. Gunther lost interest in military applications the second he decided to take over the world, ironically, and decided he could do it without starting a fight. Go figure.”
“He’s up to something, even if I can’t figure out what it is. And don’t think he’s going to stand idly by and not try and replace me with a robot like he did with Bateman. I’m surprised he didn’t start with me. I’ve been a thorn in his side for years. He knows I can’t stand to see him get away with anything.”
“No offense, boss,” Damon said, “but he has gotten around you. He’s figured out how to give the people just what they want. The profits accruing to his enterprises will be catastrophic to anyone who’s not already a collaborator or a subsidiary. Coming after you, that’s like America going after Haiti. What on earth for?”
“Don’t think reason has anything to do with how that man operates. Anybody who has to put on a fake persona just to escape his bubble boy psyche isn’t wired right. Reason’s got little to do with how he does anything.”
Damon tried to make light of the situation to help his employer relax, patting him on the shoulder. “You’re what, seven foot, two? Think of the cost of the high test titanium alloys to replace your undercarriage. Cheaper just to leave you in charge.”
“I don’t find you the least bit amusing, Damon.”
Damon distracted himself by glancing down at the back and forth of Luderman’s feet wearing a hole in his marble floor. Talk about not being able to reason with someone!
“What about the Dobermans? You upgrade their scanners so not even DNA-based biological robots could get through the estate grounds perimeter posing as humans?”
“Yes, boss,” Damon said, trying to conceal his impatience. “Though, personally I find replacing real Dobermans with robot versions a bit galling. You can’t improve on perfection. You can train the damn animals to do anything, including sniffing out one version of robot from another.”
“You’re probably right. Damn robo-versions are just one more opportunity for some hacker to break through my defenses. As soon as you can get the regular dogs trained, swap out the robo-versions for them.”
“If you don’t dial down the paranoia, you’re going to drive yourself crazy. Besides, you can’t think of everything. There is an infinity of possibilities if someone is really determined to get in here.”
Luderman stopped dead in his tracks. “Thanks for that. Well, right or not, all I have to do is outthink Gunther. And as you say, I handle the DARPA contracts these days, so I’m a lot better at worst case scenarios than he is. And for what I do miss, I have my superior tech to compensate for. Nothing like going to bat with the A-team.”
“Let’s hope you’re right,” Damon said, reacting before Luderman was aware there was a problem, thanks to his being wirelessly connected to the security grid for the property. The alarms sounded a couple seconds after he dropped that line on him. “Someone’s trying to get through.”
***
Photon noticed his tongue was no longer stuck to the top of his mouth by saliva that had turned to glue. He sipped his Powerade drink, feeling better now that the electrolytes were flowing into his system. And thinking better too, which explained his next question. “Why are we going after Luderman, if you don’t mind me asking?” Photon said.
“For a virus to invade my mind, the tech had to be more advanced than Gunther’s. The only person who has a chance of beating him at his own game is Luderman, who handles virtually all the DARPA contracts. What’s more, it’s the kind of aggressive move a military type would make.”
“And you know this because…? Oh yeah, that eye thing you do.” The jeep continued to bounce over the potholed road. “You mind slowing down? I’m not upgraded to withstand this kind of punishment.”
She threw a glance over at him without slowing. “Maybe we should visit Michael and Jane to see what we can do about getting you upgraded. Maybe that way your chances of surviving by my side will go up to three percent past its current two percent standing.”
“Very funny. Your humor is coming along fine for a robot. But for a human, I should let you know, sarcasm is considered the lowest form of funny.”
“The road will get better. Soon we will be at Luderman’s. You can bet they don’t permit potholes in the kind of neighborhood he can afford.”
“This is America, which only used to be a first world country before corporations got clever enough to stop paying taxes AFTER gobbling up all market share for jobs, thus starving the public sector. Trust me, if his neighborhood is any better, it’s because his people fix the potholes themselves.”
“Quiet. I need to focus on getting around the superior tech of his robots.”
“Superior tech and superior numbers! You didn’t tell me this was a suicide mission!”
“Shush, I said.”
“I will not shush. If you can’t handle multitasking search and destroy missions with keeping up your end of the banter, well, clearly I’m not enough of a priority anymore and it’s time I found myself a new girlfriend, perhaps one of those upgraded models.”
She smiled despite herself. He had a point. “Are you any good with war games?”
“The only reason I picked up a camera to make some money was to pay for my video games. I rock at war games. The real thing on the other hand…”
Serena projected the intel she was picking up off the security systems she’d hacked around the property onto the car’s GPS 8” x 10” nav screen. Photon made a whistling sound. “How’d you get past their security software,” he said, “if everything he’s using is next generation?”
“Whoever hacked my mind was using similar security software. When I p
ulled it apart and put it back together I made some additional improvements. Granted, it’s not my area of expertise, but whoever’s writing their security algorithms doesn’t have a hyper-cooled mind allowing them to cram years of code-writing evolution into minutes. At least not yet. He should have thought of making his most advanced robot the one in charge of computer security.”
“You’re right there,” he said. “All other forms of security are secondary in this day and age.” He studied the nav screen more closely, using his finger and sliding it across the screen to get to the other camera views. “Well, the most obvious thing is he’s got more varied prototypes under one roof with clearly military applications that…” He turned to face her. “It’s a sure bet each one has its own unique security protocols to avoid a mass shutdown. I guess my question is can you hack them all in time to shut them down? Because if you can’t, that leaves a tussle of some kind or another. I’m not for tussling. If they mess your hair or chip a tooth, I’m going to be entirely beside myself.”
“Are you that shallow to judge me by my looks?”
“I’m a male, so yeah. I’m surprised your sense-of-economy protocols require I even put that in words.”
“I’ve hacked through fifty percent of the prototypes. I will wait to shut them down for when we enter in hopes that the shock effect will help disable some of the others, or at least slow them some.”
“Excellent idea. I wonder if there’s a command station. If I can get inside it I might be able to confuse them further by issuing false commands, pretending to be Luderman.”
“They do have one. I will concentrate the next wave of hacks there to clear a path for you. You’ll be on your own once inside. Can you handle that?”
Nano Man Page 33
