The panther was on her. She waited for it to pounce, then when its jaws were virtually on her neck, she jumped on its back and positioned her hands to penetrate its brain, with the intent of crushing all higher brain functions. Before her spinal cord reflexes could act on that command, the hyper-mind, informed by its fiberoptic lightspeed processing, which it used to back up its intuitive insights by actual research and scientific investigations to verify its guesswork, stopped her. So, this was Damon in disguise. Interesting.
Such morphing ability would definitely be an asset on the battlefield where terrain and conditions changes suddenly, and one body type was suddenly not as useful as another. She didn’t want Damon dead, just put out of commission for now. For all she knew, Luderman was not the problem. And if he wasn’t, he’d need his most advanced robot to protect him. She severed his spinal cord so he couldn’t move. “Sorry, Damon. Not sure if you’re one of the bad guys yet. But I do need you out of play. Nuh, uh,” she said, pulling the chip that allowed him to communicate one way with the other robots. She could thank her hypermind’s guesswork, which it had run through the investigative processes of the fiberoptic mind, for that interjection as well. “You just lie there and meditate on what you could have done differently next time.”
Serena thought, “End Program,” separating her light-speed mind from her hypermind. She stepped down the hypermind “big picture” mode as well, with another “End Program” thought, relegating it once again to the occasional specialized data-mining and data assessment operations. It was akin to lobotomizing herself. She felt so much dumber, she had to overcome the urge to re-engage. But the price for such addiction would be steep. She was not built to stabilize a reaction like that for any length of time. The fact that she’d pulled it off for as long as she did, and not allowed herself to get drunk on the syn-adrenalin and hormones, was testament to her growth. But pushing it further would just have been testament to her hubris.
She scanned the compound for Luderman. It was a large estate, and even bounding from level to level of the house, so far she hadn’t found him. But the even bigger curiosity was that the humanoid robots were no longer coming after her. Photon must have seen his chance to intercede and did. That made following the robot trail right now her best play. She tracked the signs, notably the absence of any humanoid robots on the first three levels of the house to the roof. She’d seen the helicopter take off earlier and assumed Luderman was on it. But it didn’t hurt to be thorough. What’s more, the robots were all gathering on the roof for some reason. Photon was definitely trying to tell her something.
When she arrived on the roof, the robots were all beating on a cube that was evidently some sort of bunker. A safe room, she thought.
Photon found his way to her side. “Sorry about the zombie motif, but flaming, half dead robots after all the barrage of shells they took from their own artillery didn’t leave me with too many options. So it’s a bit of a genre-bender, sorry to say. These things are so much harder to sell. The sci-fi fans and the zombie fans seldom see eye to eye on anything.”
“They’re robot zombies. Something for both sides to enjoy.”
“My thinking exactly! Try selling that to a studio head these days. Those guys aren’t exactly known for bucking conventions.”
They both returned their eyes to the weird sight of the slow-moving, admittedly dim-witted humanoid robots, post melt-down, clawing at the high tech polymer cement and steel alloys shaping the bunker, determined to pull it apart past one onion-like layer after another.
“Sorry about the nuclear radiation,” she said.
“You radiated me! And that’s all you can say is you’re sorry about it? Do you know what radiation does to the male hard on!”
“Calm yourself. I have a plan.”
“I hope it fits inside a two week window. Because by then, I’ll be like them.”
“It’ll be close, but I think we’ll make it.”
“I’d ask you about the plan, but something tells me I don’t want to know.”
“We better get to Luderman before the zombies do.”
“I programmed them to ignore Luderman and go after the robot. Not too smart Luderman keeping cameras going inside the safe room, but I guess he was afraid come time to rescue him, he could die of old age before they made their way past all the safe rooms to find the one with him inside.”
They must have gotten through. The robot inside the bunker was now fighting the zombies and leading them away from Luderman both. His chances looked pretty good even against the overwhelming numbers. That was one advanced prototype. The nuclear radiation from his attackers bodies, the fact that their burning bodies were sending flames licking against his skin, their albeit slow punches, of which he couldn’t dodge all, hitting with the force of a falling anvil… so far his hair didn’t even looked mussed. Maybe it was the hair gel.
She and Photon made their way to Luderman, cowering in a corner of his safe room. He held a gun in both hands, bearing down on Serena.
“You chip a nail on her and I’ll bean you myself,” Photon said. “I’m planning to have sex after all this to settle my nerves, and I like her perfect figure the way it is.”
“Don’t mind him,” Serena said. “He’s a bit primitive as human models go.”
“And you’re a bit advanced as robots go,” Luderman said. Luderman took a closer look at her, realized past the distorting nature of his own paranoia that the gun wasn’t likely to work anyway, then upturned it and set it down. He held his hand out defensively as she leaned into him. “Just tell me what you want and it’s yours.”
“I want to know who was behind the military hack of my mind.”
“Ah, I can explain that… If you can possibly lean back and give me room to breathe. My heart could stand the vice around it to be loosened a bit as well.” She did as he requested. “I was responsible for the hack,” Luderman said. He redoubled his cease and desist from further action gesture. “But at Gunther’s request.”
“Why did he want it done?”
Luderman sighed. “Because you’re built with parts from all the major manufacturers, the best each of us had to offer at the time. Only the light-speed medulla oblongata surrogate was his. Because he wasn’t responsible for the higher brain functions, or any part which could be infiltrated, he couldn’t be blamed when you went off the reservation.”
“Thus making all the other companies look bad relative to his,” Serena said.
“Precisely. He pretended he never knew you were a spy for us. But we later found out that the hacker who suggested the idea was on his payroll. So Gunther literally put us up to spying on his own operations. The hacker spy was the one your friend here threw out the window. We figured so long as Gunther thought he could use him against us, he was actually our edge against him.”
“That would explain why he wasn’t aware of Damon’s capabilities,” she said.
“Correct.”
“But I just handle FBI investigations into nexgen robots coming on line which aren’t sanctioned by anybody, created by rogue inventors, or hacked by computer geeks, or perhaps self-booting, should any of them gain the ability to reproduce and mutate themselves from one generation to the other to stay ahead of the likes of people like you. Not only do I not give a very good view of Gunther’s operations, being ensconced in just one small part of it, but why allow the competition knowledge of these breakaway prototypes? That would just be giving away his competitive advantage.”
“That’s Gunther for you, the arrogant bastard.” Luderman rubbed the back of his neck to relieve the tension. “He was confident he could still outmaneuver us with any information coming to him at the same time as it came to us. He had more money, a bigger infrastructure. He also had his hands in more pies. And most of the subsidiary tech firms that serve our robotic lines also serve his, so he had leverage there as well, being as he is still the source of the bulk of their orders. Though it’s also possible that allowing us to look on constit
uted his first sign of humility. He may very well have been concerned that if he couldn’t come up with a countermeasure in time, one of us would.”
“I suspect he figured you’d all be working for him by then anyway, after having to pay off the lawsuits surrounding my meltdown. And the ones who still wanted to play hardball would simply be replaced by a robot look alike. Seems your paranoia was not exaggerated, Luderman.”
“It’s nice to have it appreciated for once. But I was hoping you could give me reason for hope.”
“I can. I’m going after Gunther next. If your nexgen military robots couldn’t stop me, what chance has he?”
“I’d leave Gunther alone, if I were you. You think there’s even one of us robotic manufacturers who wouldn’t love to buy him out or kill him off or replace him? For now there’s no one who plays this game better. And we’re not in the habit of killing off industry leaders. Like it or not we all live off their largesse, cranking out the one-generation-or-more-removed-from-the-front-of-the-line models only the richest of the rich can afford. Take out Gunther and you crash the global economy about the only way it can be crashed anymore. Forget the other robots coming after you, the humans will come after you as well. Their livelihoods are now inseparable from ours. They see the robots doing the jobs they can’t or don’t want to do. And the only way for their human upgrades to keep them in the game is with parallel advancements in AI. The hybrids and the robots are tied at the hip now, dependent on one another to carve out niches the others can’t or don’t want to occupy. And if the day comes when the hybrids can’t justify themselves, they’ll want to upload themselves into the most advanced robot bodies available. They’ve gone from hating us to loving us in one brilliant marketing stroke by Gunther.”
“Assuming the hybrids don’t overtake us,” Serena said, “a life form that is both carbon and silicon based theoretically is more robust, and also a faster evolver.”
“As the Nano-Man appears to be proving.”
She glanced up at Photon who had been occupying himself all this time with getting good angles on the zombie-apocalypse playing out on the roof, having absconded with a couple of the cameras in the bunker. He seemed perfectly at peace with the world, unlike her.
She returned her attention to Luderman. “I guess my job is over then.”
“Oh, no, it’s not. Help me up,” Luderman said. She complied with his request, remembering not to pull too hard and pull off his arm. “There’s the subject of Truska.”
Her eyes rolled white for a second. When they returned to focus on Luderman, she said, “Head of the leading Chinese robotics firm.”
“I don’t trust her.”
“Why?”
“Too tight-lipped. She would attend our Camp Futura summits, scarcely ever saying a word. Her eyes betraying that her mind was racing a mile a minute.”
“What’s the one thing that would make her a threat even to Gunther?”
“If she had the scanning technology in hand today to upload humans to a digital nirvana, no trying ties to reality, no need of a hybrid or a robotic body. That would pretty much put an end to his empire.”
“Not if he could buy them out, make that a third option for humans, as cheap or as expensive as he saw fit for maintaining quality of life here on Earth at the desired population levels. The planet is currently over-populated. Getting most souls off of it should lead to a heaven on Earth for those who remain, considering they will be upgraded enough to afford any extent of luxury their hearts desire.”
“I’m thinking Truska and the Chinese have got the idea to buy him out, and pressure him into selling by undercutting his profit streams. Gunther isn’t the only one running around with king of the world megalomania. Sorry to say most of us at this level suffer from the same syndrome. Only the Chinese are in a position to deliver on that threat.”
“Maybe I can facilitate a merger so everyone’s happy.”
Luderman snorted. “Good luck with that. We tend not to play nice with others.”
“Yeah, well, my rhetoric is more compelling than most, which reminds me, who built my hypermind if Gunther didn’t?”
“Truska. Which means she’ll know how to shut you down ten ways from Sunday before you get anywhere near her. Still think so highly of your rhetoric?”
“In all likelihood her nexgen scanning and digital-only nirvana she plans on uploading everyone to is built on futuristic versions of my own brain. I ought to be able to extrapolate enough from its designs to narrow that margin of superiority she has on me. It also puts me in a good bargaining position to broker a deal between her and Gunther, as defecting to either side could well change the endgame for both of them.”
Luderman nodded. “That might work. It’s still a David and Goliath drama, but I’m getting rather used to playing that game myself against Gunther.”
“You need to get out of here,” she said. “The radiation pulse I triggered earlier will leave you at a point of no return soon.”
“I have no way of communicating with the droid helicopter now that it’s gone. Your radiation pulse saw to that.”
“Damon can call it in. You’ll need to onboard him as well. I severed his spinal cord.”
“I won’t be able to move him.”
“I’m signaling Damon to recall Matthias now, and apprise him of your exit strategy.”
“Interesting, as I really haven’t formulated it yet beyond getting to hell out of here.”
She whistled to Photon by putting her fingers to her mouth. Just like calling a dog. She was really going to have to stop treating him like a pet if she expected this relationship to go any further.
“How will you fix your human friend? He wasn’t inside a radiation-shielded bunker for the bulk of that radiation exposure.”
“There’s only one way.”
FORTY
“I can’t believe we managed to steal a moment away from Cronos and company,” Jane said, checking over her shoulder to make sure she wasn’t speaking too soon.
“Maybe they needed a moment to themselves as well, you know, to plot and scheme against the world and figure out how to make us serve their ends.”
She grunted, and tried to relax into the admittedly cushy peat moss at the base of a date tree amid the oasis she’d created out of what was once just sand dunes. She couldn’t argue she was enjoying the interlude from all the fighting up in Alaska. “I don’t know, Michael, I think maybe you were correct. The future can happen too soon. It belongs, well, in the future.”
He stared at her disbelievingly. “I can’t believe we’ve come full circle, you and I. I spent most of my life reading sci-fi, thinking, God, I must be the most prepared person on the planet should the future happen ahead of schedule. But with each technological breakthrough I felt my grip slipping away, and I asked myself, if I’m having trouble coping, how the hell is someone going to make it who never wanted any part of it? Meeting you as I did that night in the pub for the first time just cemented my worst fears in the forefront of my brain instead of at the back of it. But look at us now.”
“Yes, Michael, look at us now. We’re the poster children for War of the Worlds, only it’s not between aliens who came from afar and humans, it’s between one generation of human enhancement and another.”
He held her hand and stroked it. “That’s just what it feels like now. I doubt change makers get to experience the world any differently, I don’t care what field they’re in. But once the new changes take… just think, being able to imagine our dream house and watching it built right before our eyes. If we want to fly or teleport to Paris, France, for lunch, we just do it. No longer will people spend most of their lives with backstage preparation waiting for the moment when they’ll actually be able to step on stage and act out the life they really want to act out. No longer will just a small handful of people get to live out their dreams, but all of us.”
“What if the dreams aren’t good enough? ‘May you get everything you wish for’… It’s a Chin
ese curse.”
“What if they aren’t? We dream better ones, that’s all. I’d rather learn non-attachment from getting everything I wanted only to find out that peace and contentment come from within than never tasting the sweetness of life, only so I can profess it’s not worth tasting.”
She sighed and leaned her head against his shoulder. “I suppose you’re right.”
“You know I’m right. Can any of us speak with authority about the future until we’ve lived it? Only then do we have a right to reject it, modify it, enhance it, build on it.”
“But what future, and who gets to decide?”
“So long as only a few people have these abilities, it’ll be them calling the shots. Reality is just someone else’s psychotic dream we’re all forced to buy into because we don’t have the resources or power of mind to do anything else. Those god-like abilities are no better being in our hands than anyone else’s. That’s why we have to live long enough to make sure everyone has access to this technology.”
Jane took a deep breath and let out another sigh. She let the rapidly falling temperature in a little, wanted to use the iciness to keep her mind sharp. She felt the crisp air pull into her lungs like a scissors cutting through them, but it was the best way she knew to keep herself honest, make sure she wasn’t using his hypnotic allure to sway her thinking, and that included how divinely he smelt, the cozy warmth of his body.
“I guess it doesn’t matter what technology we use to open the gateway to the future, just so it opens it to one and all futures at once,” she said. “I guess if we’re all building it together, with no one any more capable than anyone else, then we really will end up with the best of all possible worlds.”
“I do wonder how that’ll play out, if it’ll be like Clash of the Titans all over again. But I just can’t see myself going back, not with what I now know we’re capable of.”
Nano Man Page 35
