by John Bolin
“Yes! That’s it! What is that?”
“Transhumanism,” Alex mumbled.
“What?” Gator asked. He set his gun down and moved around the fire to see the symbol.
“It’s the symbol for transhumanism,” Alex repeated. “I don’t know much about it, but one of my students wrote a paper about it. Something about using technology and science to eliminate the ‘undesirable’ aspects of the human condition.”
Peter outlined the drawing on the ground, deepening the grooves. “Yeah, I’ve heard of it. Some guys out of Cambridge are predicting a moment in time where we actually become more machine than human. They call it the point of no return—the singularity.”
“Are you talking about cyborgs,” Linc asked, “like the Terminator?”
Peter laughed. “Something like that. But it’s more theoretical hocus pocus than it is hard science.”
“You said they wanted to eliminate undesirable aspects of the human condition,” Linc said. “What do you mean by that?”
Lightning flashed in the distance, backlighting Alex for an instant. Standing with a stick in her hand, Peter thought she looked ironically robotic.
“Transhumanists believe that eventually technology will eliminate everything undesirable,” Peter said. “Suffering, disease. Even aging.”
“Whoa,” Linc said. “You mean people could live forever?”
Peter opened his mouth to explain. “Well—”
“Can’t,” Gator said decisively. “Everyone is born, and then he dies, and then, well, it’s either up or down from there.”
“I’d like to think that we all end up in the same place together,” Alex said.
“What do you mean?” Gator said.
“I believe in a life after this one,” she said, “but hell is a fantasy. Just a way for pious people to make themselves feel better.”
Peter just smiled and took a drink of homemade beer. Whatever.
“What?” Alex said, looking penetratingly at Peter. “I saw that smirk.”
“What did I say? I didn’t say anything.”
“He’s not exactly a spiritual person,” Gator said. “But I’m working on him.”
“You do know that most of the world believes in God,” Alex said. “Even the Quechua believe in the afterlife.”
“Yeah, well, most of the world can believe whatever they want,” Peter said. “I’ll believe in something when I see it.”
Lightning flashed again, illuminating the river. Peter thought he saw something move on the water.
His mind flashed back to the commando with the mask, but he shut that crazy part of him down in a hurry. It was probably just a caiman.
“So, how do they do it?” Alex asked. “How do they extend life?”
“They don’t do it,” Peter said. “They theorize. That’s all these futurists can do. They make up impossible scenarios in order to get people excited enough to join their cult or give money to some hopeless cause.”
“Okay, theoretically, how would they do it?” Alex said.
“They use gene replacement, calorie restriction, even nanotechnology. I heard about one guy who would practically starve himself. He said it was prolonging his—”
“Nanotechnology?” Gator asked. “I’ve heard of that for weapons and body armor, but that’s it. How is nanotech supposed to extend human life?”
“Wait,” Alex said. “By ‘nanotech’ you mean . . . what?”
Linc chuckled. “Even I know this. Nanotech is really, really small technology.”
“Okay?” Alex said, “and that means?”
“Technically,” Peter said, “a nanometer is one billionth of a meter. The human DNA double helix is only two nanometers long. Put it this way: A nanometer compared to a meter is like a marble compared to the earth.”
Thunder rolled overhead, closer now.
“Anyway,” Peter said, “nanomedicine basically proposes to use swarms of microscopic nanobots, or nanites, preprogrammed to perform specific tasks within the human body.”
“Tasks like what?” Gator asked.
“Repairing DNA, destroying cancerous cells, that type of thing. They’re even predicting that nanotechnology might be able to actually build living organisms from scratch someday. They call them the engines of creation.”
“No kidding?”
“Don’t get too excited,” Peter said. “We’re a long way off.”
“What’s stopping us?
“Well, nanotechnology is incredibly expensive and time-consuming. Besides, some scientists still say nanotechnology in its purest form is theoretically impossible.”
“Impossible?”
“We’re talking about operational robots thinner than a human hair. To make them that small and manufacture enough to do anything substantive, you’d need what they call an assembler.”
Blank faces.
“Let me put it this way. Imagine a machine that could create a machine half its size. And then do it again . . . and again.”
“Until the end result is a legitimate nanoscale robot,” Gator said, filling in the gaps. “So, is it possible that these guys are somehow messing with nanotech and that’s why they are chasing down Tima?”
Before Peter could answer, the sky opened and rain began to fall, big drops at first and then more. Within seconds it was pouring, pelting the leaves over their heads, attacking the flames, and sizzling in the coals of the fire. Smoke billowed out, and the fire quickly extinguished, leaving the team in the dark.
Flashlights flicked on, and everyone scurried toward the two yellow tents. Peter watched Alex and Tima slip into one of them and zip the door behind them. He, Linc, and Skins joined Diego in the other. As he turned to zip the door shut, another bolt of lightning filled the air.
And another shadow moved to the darkness of the trees.
* * *
Peter snapped his flashlight to a clip on the ceiling of the tent, illuminating enough of the cramped space to see. It was small, especially for four guys. Luckily it wouldn’t be five; at least one of them would be on patrol through the night. Linc was next. Peter had assigned himself the three a.m. shift.
Three sleeping bags were rolled against one wall, and piles of waterproof nylon bags were littered around the center of the tent. Linc was already beginning to dig through them. Diego had claimed a space in the corner and was curled up, his arm resting on his side. He seemed to be better. The rain outside was pelting the tent, making tiny popping sounds as it fell.
Peter eased his way to the ground and pulled his knees to his chest. “Hmmm.”
“So, what’s your plan, Pete?” Linc asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I was just thinking. There’s no way to know for sure if Tima is really going to be able to find this place. I just wish we had something else to go by.”
Peter sat quietly for a moment. “You know as well as I do that the girl isn’t going to be able to lead us into the jungle. She said it was a day’s journey to the secret city. In her condition she won’t make it an hour.”
It was true. Peter had been going through the motions around the fire, maybe as much to give Alex and Tima confidence as anything else. The truth was, from the time he’d seen her in the boat before the rapids, he’d known it. There was no sense in hoping to rely on the girl to lead them to Bogart’s killer. It was time for Peter to take things into his own hands.
“We need a map,” Peter said. “Where’s the topo map of the area? Maybe we can find some kind of clue there.”
Linc winced. “We lost a few bags in the river.”
“Don’t tell me we lost the maps.”
“Afraid so.” Linc dug through one of the bright yellow bags. “Maybe we’ll get lucky, though. Never know.”
“What about your sat phone?”
“What about it?”
“You didn’t lose it, too, did you?”
“You kidding me? This is my baby,” he said pulling the phone out of his personal pack. “Never!”<
br />
“Well, can’t you use it as a modem, to get to the Internet?”
“I see where you’re going. Google Earth?”
“Exactly. At least it will give us a sense of where we are.”
Linc fumbled around for a few minutes pulling out cords, and then sat down. He punched a few buttons on his sat phone and pulled his laptop between his knees. “If I can get this thing to power up, I should be able to get a connection.” He connected a cord between his sat phone and his computer and dialed a number.
Nothing happened.
“Dang it,” Link said. “Either the thunderstorm is keeping the signal from getting through or the trees are too thick to allow a transmission.” He tried it again. Still nothing. He made a few adjustments on the phone and computer and dialed. This time Peter heard a dial tone.
“Is it working?”
“Of course it is,” Linc answered with a crooked smile. “What’d you expect?”
“Nothing less. Go to Google Maps. Give me an overview of the area.”
Linc adjusted the angle of the laptop screen and tapped at the keyboard. He squeezed his eyes together like he was concentrating. He was still wet from the rain and kept alternately wiping his forehead and the machine’s LCD screen as small drops fell to the computer.
“Okay,” he said, “the sat phone’s GPS module allows us to pinpoint where we are. Here’s the rundown.”
Peter pulled out a Ziploc bag and retrieved a small pad of paper and pen.
“Right now we are situated at the base of a valley,” Linc said. “Looks like we’re halfway into the mountains. It says we’re sitting at three thousand feet. The river sits just west of us. I can see the falls upriver.”
“What’s in the jungle?” Peter said. “That’s where we need to head. Give me the lay of the land in the jungle itself. Can you see anything?”
“To the north and east are more mountains, relatively big ones. Looks like they go on for a hundred miles, big dips and valleys between them. The sat image doesn’t even pick up all the features. I can’t imagine she’d make it over them.”
“No doubt about that. What’s south?”
“Jungle and more jungle. Follows the river into the basin on this side of the continent, eventually empties into the sea. Not far from here, maybe a day or two away, I can see several spotty areas where multiple rivers crisscross,” Linc said. He was talking fast, getting more excited as he worked. “Let’s see if I can zoom in.”
Linc’s eyes flicked across the screen, his hands clicking on the keyboard. He was in his zone. “’I’m limited in the level of zoom, but that’s typical for rural areas. Most of the images are a few years old, and satellites typically spend most of their time mapping the more heavily populated urban areas, not remote places like . . . this. Oh, wait.”
“What?”
“Along the river, maybe thirty miles from here, I can see another village about the size of this one. I count ten or twelve huts. Could be promising.” He smacked his forehead with his hand. “What am I thinking?”
“What’s wrong?” Peter said.
“Here I’m thinking we’re going to spot some top-secret research facility on Google Earth? Boss, if they’ve stayed secret this long, they know how to disguise their presence from satellites.”
Peter’s eyes narrowed. “You think they’re using jammers?”
“Why should they?” Linc said. “Seems to me they’d just build under the canopy. Or maybe find some deep pocket of fog that never goes away. Someone looking at a satellite photo wouldn’t think twice about it.”
Peter breathed out. “City in the mist, huh?”
“Exactly.”
“Yeah,” Peter said, “you’re probably right. What else we got?”
“Way ahead of you, Pete,” Linc said. He was typing and wiping his forehead, and his eyes danced all over the screen. “Well,” he said, “there’s a ton of material on transhumanism on the net. Seems that everyone wants to be a modern-day cyborg. Pages and pages about the stuff. I don’t know where to begin.”
“Try transhumanism and Amazon jungle.” Peter scooted across the tent floor to watch Linc peck the words into his keyboard. The computer whirred and spat back a series of article headlines. He read the first two.
New discovery in the Amazon to cure diabetes.
Scientist: Amazon Indians were the first transhumans.
He read the blurb on that second one. There was something about the scientist making the claim. “Who’s Michael Khang?” he asked aloud.
Linc’s computer whirred when he clicked the link.
“Apparently, he calls himself a modern-day Utopian,” Linc said. “He graduated from MIT and eventually became a highly regarded genetic scientist. Says that he began to criticize the global scientific community for their unwillingness to experiment with new technologies like stem cells and gene therapy.”
Peter shifted his position as Linc’s eyes moved back and forth across the screen.
“Listen to this. It’s from an article in Scientific American. It says that in 1996 ‘scientist Michael Khang was on an expedition to the Amazon and was never heard from again.’ They say he took some people with him on the expedition, mostly other disenfranchised scientists and doctors, and they vanished in the jungle. Let’s see . . . Later it says this Khang guy is sometimes compared with David Koresh and Jim Jones. There seems to be some ‘irrational fervor’ about him.”
“He was lost in the Amazon?” Peter asked.
“In Peru,” Linc added, looking at Peter.
Peter thought for a minute. “Where would a guy like that hide?” He looked up at the ceiling, listening now to the streams of rainwater flowing off the tent and onto the jungle floor. “Wait a minute! Go back to that topo map. Show me any pockets of fog that look stationary.”
Linc slowly scrolled over the satellite image. “Well, there’s a few to choose from.”
Peter leaned over the screen. “It would be somewhere away from any other villages and not more than a day’s run from here. What would you say, ten miles max?”
“Better widen to thirty, just to be safe,” Linc said. “The girl was scared and had people chasing her. She could’ve been highly motivated to go the extra mile or two.”
Peter watched as Linc drew a thirty-mile circle around their location. “What about . . . there?” He pointed at the screen.
Linc zoomed in. “Looks good. But there’s a problem.”
“What?”
“There are a few 10,000-foot mountains between here and there.”
Peter nodded. “So we go over ’em.”
“She couldn’t have been that motivated.”
“You’re right,” Peter said. “Best to follow the river anyway. Let’s look again.”
Lightning flashed, followed by a thunderclap. The flash cast a silhouette of a man against the wall of their tent.
The figure held a handgun and was wearing a mask.
* * *
With a roar Peter burst out of the tent and slammed into the attacker, rifle in hand.
He held the man’s wrist and drove the man backward. The rain pelted him instantly, and his feet almost slipped. He reached back to drive his fist into the man’s nose when the lightning flashed again.
It was Gator.
“Easy!” Gator said, his own fists clenched. “What in the world are you doing, boss?” A hood was pulled over his face and his night-vision goggles were shoved up on his forehead . . . like a mask. The Raging Bull—his favorite gun—was in his hand.
“Uh, I . . . thought . . .” He took a deep breath and let it out. “I just have to go pee. Besides, it’s my shift.”
“I thought it was Linc’s.”
“I’m giving him a break,” Peter said. He stuck his head back into the tent to grab his rain parka and rifle. “I’m taking your shift, Linc. You’ve got the three o’clock.”
“Okay, but—”
Peter pulled his head back outside and put his parka on. “You see a
nything?” he asked Gator.
“Nah.” Gator holstered his gun and began taking his own parka off. “Just watch for potholes. Twisted my ankle once.”
“Gotcha.” Peter shouldered his rifle and took the flashlight from Gator. “Go get some rest.”
Peter walked away mumbling to himself. Seeing ghosts now, Zachary?
