“I suppose there’s only one way it can play out. We’ll have to use this power of mind to explode into the multiverse, create as many worlds as there is desire to live in them, even if it’s just one of us that wants to live in them and we can’t cajole or convince anyone else to join us.”
“You mean metaphorically, or literally?”
“It might start metaphorically. We can do test runs in virtual reality in our souped up minds.”
“That should give new meaning to getting lost in our heads.”
“Once we’re convinced we’ve created a world inviting enough for ourselves and others to live in, then we can use the same power of mind to make it happen in the real world, on some other planet.”
“It’s as if to become all that we’re meant to be, we first have to become gods,” he said. “It’s not the end of evolution, it’s the beginning.”
She smiled. “Maybe. In all this darkness it’s easy to use our minds to shine a light on things. But come sun up, we’ll have to see if our thoughts really are any brighter and more full of hope than the world we were given.”
FORTY-ONE
“For what it’s worth, walking through paradise isn’t any less hell on my ankles than traipsing through Alaskan tundra,” Cronos said, bending down to pick up a date, chewing on it, then glancing up at the date tree. It wasn’t too long ago that this place was just naked Saharan desert, before Mike and Jane got it in their heads to play Adam and Eve to a brave new world. “I guess there’s no helping some people.”
Jane seemed to be enjoying her handiwork, and Michael was rather enjoying holding hands with her and sneaking kisses. Admittedly, their Adam and Eve thing wore a lot better on them than other roles they’d played together recently.
“Explain to me how your hive minds got so smart?” Cronos said, directing his question at Jane. “You’re a genius biotech designer. What do you know about hive minds?”
“I just took all the research that’s been done on hive minds over the last twenty years,” she said, “and distilled what I needed. I set it up so they had any number of communication pathways to one another should anything fail. And I coaxed them to evolve within the limits of helping the person to be all he can be.”
Cronos grunted. “There’s that expression again, ‘evolving within limits’. Is there really such a thing, or were you just fooling yourself like everyone else?” He turned his eyes from taking in the sprawling oasis, and glared at her. “Life will always find a way, doctor. Even artificial life. To break down the barriers. To go where no woman has gone before. It’s just what it does. Surely you could have seen this? Or did you get caught up in your own megalomania?”
“Ease up, Cronos,” Michael said. “You’re talking to the woman who just freed the third world from first and second world oppression. And she did it without a single shot being fired.”
“Yes, that… well, take my word for it, that’s another utopian fantasy that will burst like every other soap bubble, including the one about ‘evolving within limits’.”
“Ah, Cronos, I think you’re going to want to take a look at this,” Finelli said, his face buried in his laptop supported in front of him as he walked, slung over his shoulder by way of a makeshift guitar strap, per the usual.
“I can tell from your tone I’m most decidedly not going to want to take a look at it.” Cronos chose finally to drop the latest date in his hand and hike over to where Finelli was standing. He stared into the monitor beside him. “What am I looking at, Finelli?”
“See those oil-rich sand deposits in Canada?”
“Yep.”
“That was two hours ago. This is now.” The field Finelli showed him was distinctly void of any such oil sands.
Cronos took a deep breath and before he let it out he’d formulated his next question. “What about the latest oil fields opened up in South Dakota?”
“Gone. As with the coal deposits in Colorado. Everywhere I check, here or abroad, the oil and coal is just gone.”
Cronos looked up at Jane. “Ah, Lady Eve, can I ask you a ticklish question? Would you happen to be an environmentalist, by any chance? You know, a tree hugger? I mean, I’ve always expected as much with all this love of wilderness, but I think it’s time we got our cards on the table.”
“I would think that would be bloody obvious. When I said I go for the outdoorsy types, I didn’t mean I enjoyed taking walks through polluted hinterlands and mountains of garbage.”
Cronos hit her with a fake smile. “Well, it seems the group mind power of the nanites you spawned, now covering a third of Africa, is flexing its intellectual muscle. And for its opening move on this chessboard, it has totally removed us from the fossil fuel era, once and for all.”
“Hip, hip, hooray,” Micahel said.
Cronos sighed. “No, Michael, I think you’re missing the finer points here. Anything that powerful is now so far up the food chain from us, we may as well be ants relative to it.”
“How is that even possible?” Jane said. “They’re not programmed to evolve beyond their limits.”
“I don’t think they have yet,” Cronos explained. “They’re still helping you to be all you can be, Jane. You’re the environmentalist, not them.”
“I’ll have them stand down from any further action,” she said.
“I think we’re past that, Jane. You can’t very well tell them not to help you be all you can be. You would literally be removing the one stopgap that keeps them from ruling the world in their image rather than yours. And I’d rather take your limited view of the future over theirs, if you don’t mind. Don’t care to go toe to toe with an uber-mind when it comes to predicting what it’ll do next.”
“What can I do?” she said.
“Give me a minute to think. I’m used to pulling rabbits out of a hat, just not raising the Titanic from the bottom of the sea in the same timeframe!” Cronos paced and pulled at his hair.
He stopped suddenly and looked up. “Sorry, Michael, but it looks like I get to have my cake and eat it too.”
“What are you saying?” Jane said.
“I’m afraid Michael has to die.”
“That’s just not going to happen,” she said, clasping Michael’s hand even tighter. “Besides, I don’t see the connection.”
“Your nano offspring that constitutes the African brain collective is a merger of both your nanites, the ones with your penchant for oasis building, and the ones with his weaponized thinking. If Michael’s out of the picture they will no longer have what they need to buffet your vision of the world.”
“But that means they won’t be able to protect the ground they staked out either. These oases will dissolve back into sand like mirages.” Jane was virtually in tears at the thought. It was the first sign that she was surrendering to Cronos’s rhetoric.
Cronos kept pushing anyway. “With this kind of mind power, how long do you think it’ll be before the ‘evolving within limits’ paradigm crumbles? Then it won’t be environmental utopia they’ll be creating. It’ll be God knows what. But I’m willing to bet us relative ants aren’t going to appreciate their logic, whatever it is.”
She locked eyes with Michael as if she was seeking permission from him to act on Cronos’s crazy idea. By then, he’d become infected by the memes himself. “It seems like the only move we have,” he said.
“I refuse to believe that,” Jane said. “We just need to give ourselves time to think.”
“Maybe,” Michael said, “if that group mind power was every living thing linked up on planet Earth. Every human, every animal, every tree, all upgraded in some way, all feeding into one another’s thinking with their own unique takes on the world, maybe from such a collective synthesis we could respect what the collective felt about changing the rules of the game. But to have a disenfranchised group mind deciding for the rest of us… I don’t see how that’s any better than a handful of co-conspiring corporate heads determined to rule the world to their advantage and our loss.�
��
She buried her face in her hands as if to obliterate all connection with reality until such time as it was giving her higher brain centers the feedback she desired. She took her hands away from her face, finally, her expression suggesting a complete reboot. “How do we know Finelli’s computer hasn’t been hacked, and this isn’t just some ploy to disempower us?”
Cronos took a deep breath and held it. Finally he let it out and said, “It’s an undeniable possibility. I’m afraid there’s only one way to know for sure.”
“And what way is that?” Michael asked.
“When you were asleep, in synchronized REM state, you teleported us from Alaska to here. I know I said it was a C-130 transport that got us here. But I really wasn’t too keen on you finding out that you had that kind of power, at least not until I could figure out how to control it and make it serve me.”
“I see no reason to come clean now. We still have time to hop a plane to Canada,” Michael said.
“Do we, Michael?” Cronos locked eyes with him. “Do you know what a group mind of that magnitude could do in that timeframe?”
Michael turned to face, Jane. “He’s right.”
“I know he’s right!” she shouted. “That’s why this is so wrong.”
Michael shifted his attention to Cronos. “You have any of that paralytic left?”
“No,” Cronos said, “I’m ashamed to say, self-respecting, ten-steps-ahead-of-you strategist that I am. But we shouldn’t need it.”
“Come again?” Michael said.
“You should be able to pull off the stunt from a waking state by reaching out to the group mind you cocreated together, and simply visualizing what you want. It’ll do the heavy lifting for you.”
“I’m sorry for hating you for being such a monster, Cronos,” Michael said, taking Jane’s hand. “As it turns out, it seems the devil too shall do God’s work.”
Cronos shrugged off the compliment. “What are monsters for except to help you succumb to your worst nightmares?”
Michael and Jane looked at one another and then closed their eyes, tightening their grips on one another’s hands. In the next instant they were in Canada, standing beside the oil sands. The trucks and the rigs for extracting the oil were still there, and so were the people in a mild state of panic. Everyone was at a loss to explain what just happened. Everyone except for Michael and entourage. In all the commotion, no one had noticed their unorthodox arrival, or if they had, dismissed it as the result of a lapse of attention, being as everyone had far too much on their minds.
An engineer brought over his laptop to show the onsite project manager, not fifteen feet from where they were standing. Maybe the auspicious timing and placement had been overseen by the nano hive mind. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say we’d been hacked,” the engineer said. “But your own people and the equipment have been dredging up nothing but sand for days now. Even if this was one of those crop circle things where jokesters came in the middle of the night and threw regular sand over everything, assuming such a thing was possible…”
“It’s starting to look like real aliens are behind this,” the project manager said. “Could it be some mass hallucination? Maybe instead of crop circle phenomena, we should be thinking Jim Jones and someone spiking our coffee.”
“Already checked, sir. We have no shortage of paranoids running through additional off-the-wall explanations and worst case scenarios now, but so far nothing.”
“Seen enough yet, Michael?” Cronos said.
“Yeah.” Michael crumpled to the ground.
“Michael!” Jane screamed. She bent over him and shook him, then put her fingers to feel for a neck pulse, then started CPR until she realized the futility of the gesture, in more ways than one, and collapsed over him sobbing.
The engineer and project manager turned to see what was going on, catching Jane’s last attempts at CPR before relenting. “He’s not the first to drop from a heart attack under the stress and he won’t be the last,” the project manager said, handing the laptop back to the engineer. “Keep working on our little problem, Ryker.”
“Yes, sir,” the engineer said before retreating up to his command station.
Cronos lifted Jane off Michael. “What’s done can’t be undone. At least not anymore.” He allowed her to bury her face in his chest as he walked her off, half steering her, half carrying her by supporting the bulk of her weight. She was still sobbing uncontrollably.
“Find us a quiet port in the storm of all this madness, Finelli,” he said, observing the fights that were starting to break out amidst the rising tensions of the oil workers over whose outlandish theory about whatever happened to the oil sands was the correct one.
***
Cronos looked out the window of the airstream diner from the 1950s with no idea how he’d gotten there. He must have taken Michael’s loss harder than he was pretending to himself and to the others. A glance over at the droid earth-mover parked outside the diner, though, like a metal dinosaur deciding which ordinary-sized vehicle to devour first, and he was pretty much able to fill in the rest.
He shifted his attention to Jane who was currently leaning her head against the window. Sitting up on her own evidently took more energy than she was willing to redirect from her grieving. He was trying to think of something supportive to say when the sight of a woman coming his way made him jump the train of his thoughts.
Serena strode up to them past a bunch of rubbernecking oil workers who couldn’t be lifted out of their depression enough to do much more than look, but look they did. She sat down opposite Cronos and Jane, next to Finelli. She came with her own photographer who was balancing his video camera on his shoulder and trying to get the best angle on the table.
“I’m sorry to say you’re rather late for the party,” Cronos said to her.
“Depends on which party you’re talking about,” Serena said without missing a beat.
“You mind telling me how you found us?” Cronos asked still deciding how he should feel about her sudden intrusion onto the scene. But his ability to out-strategize everyone in the room on a dime seemed to have evaporated with Michael’s death, again, much to his surprise. Maybe he was growing some humanity in the face of all this inhumanity.
“When engaging my hyper-mind to plot potential places you might abscond to failed to do the trick, I wired it up to my fiberoptic mind which works at light speed.”
Cronos’s eyebrows went up.
“I was then able to forge a link with the nano uber-mind spread across the African continent. I couldn’t maintain the connection for long as doing so would have fried my mind entirely. But the bond lasted long enough for them not only to tell me where you were but to teleport me here. Nice trick, by the way. Teleportation. Way out of my weight class, as so few things are these days. And then I felt the nano-mind go black even before I had time undo the hookup. You want to explain that part to me.”
Cronos grimaced. “We pulled the plug on it. Decided it was just a matter of time before it started evolving in directions no one could predict or control.”
“Makes sense,” Serena said.
“What’s with the photographer?” Cronos asked, looking up at the camera lens.
“Thanks for reminding me,” Serena said. “Perhaps some mind damage occurred after all prior to severing the link with the uber-mind. I brought him here for Jane to heal.”
It was the first time Jane raised her head from the window and seemed to pay attention to what was being said.
“He’s been exposed to radiation poisoning,” Serena explained. “Nothing I can do about it. Nothing anybody can do about it. But you can fix him,” she said, looking straight into Jane’s eyes and maybe into her heart too.
“I could have,” Jane said, “but from this heartbroken state I’m in, I doubt I can save myself right now. The nanites will likely read my desire to die as my latest prime directive. The only reason they haven’t acted on it already is because they’re detoxing f
rom the love hormones which regulate them.”
“I’ll take my chances,” Serena said, taking the empty syringe out of Cronos’s jacket, which he himself had forgotten he was still carrying. She pulled the blood out of Jane’s arm, filling the syringe with it. “Type O blood. Nice trick. Makes you a handy donor for most any champion that comes along.” She injected Photon with it, who mostly acted annoyed that she was making his camera shot jittery by tugging on his arm.
“You probably just shortened whatever already brief time he has remaining on this earth,” Jane said.
“You’ll snap out of it.” Serena handed the empty needle back to Cronos who secured it on his person. “And pretty soon if I’m any judge of you.”
“You’re clearly no judge of me,” Jane said defensively.
Serena filled Jane and the others in on everything that was going on back in the real world, the world now run by Gunther and his lot, Truska, Luderman, and the others. The world that hadn’t existed when Michael and Jane set out on their quest not knowing it was ultimately to remake the world in some image other than what Gunther and his minions had in mind.
Before she could finish her story, Jane was back on line. It seemed Serena had judged right; Jane’s save-the-world martyr complex far outweighed any love she had for Michael, as strong as it was.
“You’ll need a new champion,” Serena explained, “and soon. I’m prepared to do a lot of the heavy lifting, but I can’t do this alone. And as much as you’d like to kill this one, right now,” she said, looking over at Cronos, “You’re going to need him to continue to advise you. He’s equal parts good and evil, which should come in very handy in this brave new world. He could turn on you at any moment, which is one more reason you’ll need a new champion, but as it turns out, even Cronos’s fickleness is a strategic advantage in this turncoat world where anyone is reprogrammable on a dime now that everyone is working with some upgrade from Gunther labs, or is an all-out robot.”
Nano Man Page 36
