Mind of a Child_ Sentient Serpents

by Dean C. Moore

  “Considering how OMEGA FORCE reacted when you took this toy away from them, I’m guessing this doesn’t end well,” Patent said.

  “Sorry, my friend,” Leon said, his tone conveying just how contrite he felt. “But just in case I’m wrong about how things will unfold in the days ahead, figured they best be up to speed on the nanotech. On another note…

  “Laney has brought it to my attention that it would take a lot of scientists working in concert to advance nanotech like this, even working off the blueprints handed to them by a Tesla of our times. And that was before Natty made his latest modifications. Although, maybe I’m using that term loosely, as Tesla was more than a designer, he was also an engineer. So where are all the engineers to implement Natty’s designs coming from? According to Laney there aren’t enough scientists in all the world. And she ought to know; she’s one of them.”

  Patent sighed. “They rounded up a dozen or so chief scientific architects for the Manhattan Project, including names like Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman and Robert Oppenheimer, and told them to come up with an atomic bomb, which simply couldn’t be built with the technology at the time. And they gave them virtually no time to do it in. The result was an atomic bomb just a couple years later. Of course, to meet that deadline, the project grew to employ more than 130,000 people and cost twenty-six billion dollars in today’s money. Research and production took place at more than thirty sites across the U.S.

  “The short answer is, you get enough project teams together and you hold a gun to their heads, and you’d be surprised what’s possible. But yeah, you need plenty of funding, gobs of cutting edge scientists—most of whom are already spoken for and already highly paid and already doing fascinating work, so would be hard to bribe or steal away… and you need some place to do all this work in secret, in an age that defies secret-keeping.

  “You have some missing pieces to fill in, all right. But is what’s Natty pulling off doable? Yeah, sure, anything’s doable. The trick is filling in the missing pieces. Just like it was for those physicists at Los Alamos.”

  Another cadet replaced the prior one in the circle trying to quiet the applause with a gesture before showing his stuff.

  “Assuming Natty knows,” Leon said, “and has just been keeping the truth from us, I don’t suppose waterboarding him is the best way to come up with the answers.”

  Patent huffed. “Who’s to say the conscious part of him is the brightest part? I’ve seen trained and untrained assassins both carry out assignments under hypnosis without missing a beat. You don’t know what RevoCorp did to that kid. Maybe they debrief him once a day, milk him for all he’s worth, then let him remember one idea in ten, whichever ones they deem de-classifiable. And set to work on the other nine ideas of the ten.”

  Leon watched as the second cadet shouted “Flame on!” and turned himself into a human torch. He flew up off the ground to just above the circle and hovered to finger-in-mouth whistles, and claps before swooping off. He sent fire balls out of his palms to ignite sections of the forest, which the rain quickly put out. Then he returned to the center of the circle.

  “Sorry, dude. But we have to deduct points for originality,” the ring master and scorekeeper said.

  “But I haven’t even explained how I fly yet!” the Human Torch complained, his voice rising an octave or two by the time he finished getting out all the words.

  “Save it for the makeover.”

  They unceremoniously pushed him out of the circle to make way for the latest contestant. The Human Torch’s flames long since squelched by his downward mood swing at being told he’d lost on points.

  “Something else, since when do the brightest people work for corporate or the government, for that matter?” Leon said, continuing his conversation with Patent, without missing a beat, regarding where Natty was coming by all the engineers he needed to make his every dream come true. “They’re probably off somewhere being entrepreneurs.”

  “You score 1600 on your SATs, trust me, someone’s approaching you for something clandestine. Maybe China isn’t the only one with a gene bank for geniuses.”

  “Maybe they’re behind the curve and we’ve been doing as much for decades?”

  “Nah, we haven’t had that kind of technology for decades. But perhaps someone has figured out how to smarten up an existing pool of scientists to super-genius standards using CRISPR, MAGE and CAGE.”

  Leon knew enough to know he was referring to the latest gene editing tools that made gene splicing child’s play. “But where’s the funding coming from for all this?”

  “Please, what do you think the unending drug wars that we can never seem to win are about? They’re about funding pet projects like this. DARPA is the public face of this kind of work; it’s what we let the world see, because if it were all hidden, then people would definitely start digging. But for every DARPA, there may well be hundreds more divisions just like it all over the world, all working on far more radical stuff that can’t go on in the limelight. Who knows how many of them Truman is dialed into?”

  “You and Natty should do lunch. He’s a conspiracy nut too.”

  Leon watched as contestant number three melted himself from the head down, like a candle rapidly burning down. Whatever the purpose of this ploy was, the punch line was a ways off. In the meantime the curious faces in the circle were also twisting up into disgusted expressions.

  Patent continued his conversation with Leon, likewise, not missing a beat, despite the latest distraction, “Read this book by Piers Anthony, Macroscope. Long, long time ago. In it, the brightest of the bright knew they’d make a target of themselves by sticking their heads out. So they pretended to not be so bright. Maybe enough to land a DARPA job, somewhere in the non-threatening spectrum of genius. But if they were off-the-charts bright, then they were doing their real work at home at night in their basements, assuming they had a day job. The rest were, as you say, working off the grid somewhere on god knows what. We think of a Tesla type as this guy that comes along every so many generations. What if there are hundreds, even thousands of these guys at any given time, and always have been? Only they didn’t have access to the tools before that are so prevalent today.”

  When Leon glanced back at him in an incredulous double-take, Patent steamrolled right over his resistance. “Most of these guys are lazy geniuses, you know? They’re not all driven by passion, trust me. And make things too difficult on them, they’ll find some other way to make a living that doesn’t rely on genius. That was then, this is now. Today, they can put together a cutting edge bio lab for peanuts. And they’re not isolated anymore. Through the black internet they can form supportive brain trusts with people scattered all over the globe, all working off-grid with cutting edge technology. Scared yet?”

  “Positively trembling.” Leon returned his eyes to the circle. Candle Wax guy was now a pool of toxic liquid making everyone cough and step back. The ooze moved towards the feet of the young soldiers dissolving the boots.

  “Shit!” a couple of them said, jumping back.

  “That said,” Patent intoned, still caught up in his conversation with Leon, “you should see me trying to get these ALPHA UNIT tech whizzes to do anything but play videogames. After their fun is over here, they’ll be right back at their Xboxes. Lazy genius is as en vogue as ever. I’d like to find the bastard who’s motivating all this creativity. Sounds like he could teach me a thing or two.”

  “And all this happening outside of the mainstream scientific community? Any of those people would say we’re mad. That our rationales for how someone could sabotage the timeline, causing the future to collapse into the present, are too farfetched.”

  “They’re just the foot soldiers, the pawns on the chessboard. Handing out progress in metered doses the powers-that-be decide is what the public can absorb without freaking out, or without compromising their own interests.”

  Leon massaged his dome and groaned. “As fun as all this speculation has been, none of it gets u
s any closer to the truth. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how things play out. Maybe we already hit on the solution to our little problem and just don’t know it, maybe the actual solution has yet to present itself.”

  The circle of ALPHA UNIT cadets forgot about the Human Ooze and instead circled about Patent and Leon. “So when do we get to play with this new toy?” one of them said. “For real. You know, like in an actual battle?”

  “Sorry, guys. But the Nano Wars have been suspended for now,” Leon explained.

  The riot was immediate. Leon hadn’t heard this much bellyaching in his life, even from first year grunts experiencing boot camp for the first time. Patent just shook his head, his eyes downcast. “I’m so sorry about this total lack of professionalism,” he said, his voice weighted down by shame. “Would you like me to kill them all with my bare hands? It’s been a while since the gods of Valhalla have had a worthy sacrifice in their name.” His tone suggested he was deadly serious.

  Leon smiled. “You can’t blame them. It’s our fault for getting them all worked up. I’ll let you talk them down,” Leon said, patting his back. “Now that dusk is melting into night, they’ll get to deploy soon. That should help take the edge off.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  In the dead of night, the ALPHA UNIT soldiers yanked off the camo netting covering Leon's armada. The insect-like character of some of the futuristic vehicles—like burrowing beetles, flying wasps—made them look paradoxically eco-friendly. Armored with metal-alloy scales, some of the transports looked like dinosaurs, and more at home in the primeval forest than the more modern-day animals. For now, the force was illuminated primarily by the abundant flitting fireflies. And the sprawling carpets of glow worms that were so prevalent in the region where the bird men made their home. That didn’t last long.

  The lead cars rolled out, clearing a path in the forest for the division by launching missiles and shooting flames via industrial-sized flame throwers.

  Whatever was still standing, by some miracle of the imagination, was mowed down with the “weed-whacking” technology of rotating saw blades that made quick work of trees the size of Arkansas.

  ***

  Quinny, in his twenties, an awkward, scrawny, pasty-faced youth, was in the driver's seat of the first lead car as the convoy rolled out. “This thing is going to let me drive it, right?” he said, referring to the vehicle’s AI. He stared disbelievingly at the steering wheel, the accelerator pedal, and the rest of the vehicle, all moving according to their own dictates.

  Marty, the larger-bodied, healthier-looking, Kansas corn-fed one, sitting beside him in the passenger seat, said, “Maybe if you talked to it.”

  Quinny glared at him.

  “Seriously,” Marty said, “have you taken the time to develop some kind of relationship?”

  ***

  Inside the convoy’s second lead car, running parallel to the first, just a few truck lengths to the side, Raker, in his thirties, a self-described urban redneck, looked out his front windshield at the holocaust out the window. The industrial sounds of rotating saw blades, exploding arsenal, even the engine noise of their trucks, drowning out the more natural sounds of the forest—no easy feat, considering the latter was typically a cacophony all its own. “I gather we're not in eco-friendly mode anymore.”

  Satellite, in his twenties, with long spider-like appendages one would only idly call fingers, in the passenger's seat beside Raker, keyed away at his elongated keyboard, designed to accommodate the maestro’s advanced keystroke abilities and to throw up a virtual screen of any desired dimensions in front of him. For now he was just using the dashboard’s twenty-two inch screen. “We've been sending out high-pitched acoustical signals for hours. Trust me, any animal and insect-life is long-gone.”

  Raker swatted a mosquito taking a bite out of his neck. He eyed the blood on his hand under the cabin light. “Must be language-challenged,” he said in deference to the mosquito.

  “Funny how I’ve been hearing insect and bird noises all this time, when you say you chased them away hours ago,” Raker said.

  “The mind tends to fill in the blanks for us based on what we expect. Otherwise we’d have to bring a hypervigilance to every moment few people can sustain. I suspect that’s how those bird men look like real birds ruffling their feathers and moving about every time you glance at their body tattoos.”

  “If you ask me, they’ve learned to flex their individual muscle fibers, and shiver and shake and twitch them on command to add to the effect. I know I didn’t imagine all of that.”

  “If you say so,” Satellite said absently.

  Raker killed the headlights; enough of the forest was sufficiently ablaze now to provide his eyes all the light they needed. A lot of the other drivers had done the same. He gazed out the window at Kurt, in his mid-twenties—a veritable dinosaur by ALPHA UNIT standards—walking alongside the tires of his truck that were taller than Kurt was. Raker shouted out at Kurt through the rolled-down window. “You plan on walking the entire Amazon rainforest?”

  A giant overheated tree trunk fell in front of them and exploded in fiery cinders, so Kurt had to put his hand up to his eyes. Catching some of the shrapnel in his forearm and having to pick it clear. Automatic rifle fire sounded further out ahead, followed by clandestine explosions. “Just like strolling Detroit city late at night.”

  Raker, a fellow-Detroiter, soaked in the ambiance. “Yeah, I am feeling a little homesick now that you mention it.”

  ***

  Mandrake, in his early twenties, with red hair and a trimmed beard that gave him a severe look, the animal lover and trainer of ALPHA UNIT, was riding along in the 2nd row of vehicles in the second column. He jumped out the passenger side of the cab, and dropped the door on the bed of the truck. He watched the kangaroos jump out from beneath the curtained top arching over the cargo bed. He whistled and gestured at them to spearhead the effort.

  The kangaroos hopped out in front of the convoy, taking the lead.

  ***

  Marty and Quinny eyed the rampage of kangaroos gallivanting past them from the cab of their truck.

  “Do you believe this shit?” Marty, in the passenger seat, said. “I liked us better when we refused to step on a snail. That's an animal rights violation if I ever saw one.”

  Just ahead of the mobile troop transport, the Kangaroos fanned out, covering a wider swath of land. One of them spotted an Ubuku native dug in with a .50-caliber machine gun, a gun belt, and sand bags.

  The kangaroo reached into his pouch, picked out one of the grenades, pulled the pin, and lobbed it at the gunman. The native wielding the .50-caliber machine gun was blown to bits.

  Marty and Quinny witnessed the kangaroo vaporizing .50-Caliber Guy.

  Marty pounded the dashboard. “Does that animal even have an agent?! Is he on profit-sharing? Or is he working for little kangaroo bonbons?”

  Quinny, gesturing to former .50-Caliber Guy, said, “Could you take a second to be freaked out by the native with the .50 caliber gun? If you're going to be upset with screwing with the natural order of things, get your priorities straight!”

  More soberly, Marty said, “Yeah, you have to wonder how long he’d have sat there slack-jawed, not firing the .50 caliber if he was staring at something besides a kangaroo.”

  One of the kangaroos was reaching into his pouch for another grenade to launch when the Ubuku-trained jaguar pounced at it from the tree line, from nearly thirty feet up in a tree. The jaguar never made it. Another adult 6’ 7”, 200 lb. red kangaroo broadsided it, pounding him with both feet, in midair, at twenty-five feet off the ground, and sending him flying into a tree. The tree took care of the rest, breaking the jaguar’s spine. No small feat, considering a cat’s inborn flexibility.

  “Did you see that?!” Quinny exclaimed, gazing out his window.

  “You know, if we used these guys in urban warfare, I gotta believe the shock appeal would be even greater.” Marty pondered the point further. “Yeah, maybe I
should get over myself.”

  “You know, not everyone supports cultural exchange, but that right there, is why I’m all for it.”

  Several of the bird men on the ground were trying their capoeira on the kangaroos. Finding out the hard way that tangling with a kangaroo wasn’t the best idea. The natives, adept at fighting with their feet as well, must have felt emboldened against the creatures. But they hadn’t figured on the creatures’ ability to lean back on their tails, which were able to support their full weight, as they hammered their legs into you. Those capoeira fights didn’t last long. The natives got the message real fast and retreated back into the darkness of the forest to consider another approach.

  “Kickboxing against a kangaroo? Whatever they’re smoking, I want some.”

  Marty shook his head. “I thought these bird men were supposed to be bad-ass fighters. Can’t believe the grapevine distorted the truth so much from OMEGA FORCE on the front line by the time the news reached ALPHA UNIT.”

  “Yeah, well, I think some of our premature success might have to do with them never having encountered this lifeform before. And don’t look now, pal, but when it comes to throwing exotic lifeforms at one another, they have us way outnumbered.”

  “Point taken.”

  ***

  Inside the second lead car, Raker, who’d flipped his headlamps back on to get through a dark stretch where the fires were burning less intensely, noticed moths flocking by the thousands to the lights on their trucks. Then he witnessed the bats flocking to the moths and crashing into the headlights. In short order, he lost both of his headlamps. From how dark things suddenly went, apparently so had everyone else. “Damn it! What idiot forgot to put guards on those lights?!”