The God Gene Read online

  THE GOD GENE

  An Age of Abundance Novel

  By

  Dean C. Moore

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Dean C. Moore. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  ONE

  “I’ll take the antipasto,” Corona said, handing the waitress the menu.

  “The aromatic roasted root vegetables for me,” Nova said, “and, oh, could I get the glow-in-the-dark skin like the bus boy over there? Seems like a great way to cut down on electricity for someone who enjoys nightlife as much as I do.”

  “Sure, the waitress said without missing a beat.” She took off with both his and his girlfriend’s orders. Her legs spoke better of her from behind than her face did from the front. She had a lion’s tale coming out of her lower back that also did a lot more for Nova’s dick than the cat-whiskers coming out of her face. Don’t ask him to explain it.

  “You’re buying a new skin suit at a diner?” Corona sounded surprised.

  “Sure, why not?”

  “I just think Wal-Mart is better for that kind of thing.”

  “Yeah, right, trust my designer makeover to someone making minimum wage. Probably end up skinless.”

  Coronoa smiled and leaned in to caress his chin. “Skinless would be a good look on you. Not like you have any body fat to complain about. Technically, it’s referred to as a transparent epidermis—which they also serve up here, but whatever.”

  After missing a couple beats he realized he’d gotten lost in her impossibly large golden irises. He reminded himself to breathe. “Enough, already. I swear, ever since you got those cat eyes, it’s like everything you say to me sounds like it’s coming from God himself.”

  “Yeah, they’re hypnotic. That’s the whole point. Not everyone finds it as easy to get laid as you.”

  Nova’s eyes bounced from one handsome guy to another in the restaurant eying her up like a pinball in a pinball machine each player was having a little too much success batting with the paddles. “You have me now, so could you trade in the eyes for something else, please?”

  “Geez, insecure much?”

  “Fine. Change the subject.”

  “Fine. And, oh, by the way, they only make minimum wage at the diner. Don’t think the tips are going to make all the difference when they key in the number combo on the CRISPR machine for your new skin suit. Their greasy fingers over the RNA-sequencers probably just translate into you with a few hundred pounds of whale blubber on the other end.”

  Nova smiled. “You’d like that. You hate rolling off me on to the mattress. That way you could toss and turn on top of me all night long to your heart’s content.”

  She laughed so hard she squirted wine through her nose. If that weren’t embarrassing enough… Well, leave it to Corona to slurp wine through a straw. “Promise me, the next time you go to order a personal makeover, it’s at one of those fast-food places that’s a hundred percent robotic. Humans just add all sorts of errors to the mix. Lucky if they get your food right, far less the rest of your life.”

  “No bleeding heart social liberal would be caught dead in one of those joints. At least these people are trying to better themselves beyond what they can do on universal basic income.”

  “They can buy a Lear Jet on what their annual raise gives them on UBI! Thanks to the profit sharing from the hundred and one new inventions hitting the market every five minutes. Now that a small amount of all proceeds from such endeavors goes back into the public sphere.”

  “I forget sometimes you’re so Republican.” Nova shivered so hard from the cold chill running up his spine at the mention of the word “Republican” that he cracked his neck vertebrae.

  “If they wanted to better themselves they’d drink a nano-cocktail like the rest of us, so that with their 1,000 plus IQs they can invent away to their hearts content, adding to the growing UBI figure each year. This living-museum you call a diner does more to drag us into the past than take us into the future. Who sounds like the Republican now?”

  “You’re right. Can we pretend I was on the other side of this argument the whole time? I’m afraid my bleeding-heart liberal genes might just self-destruct otherwise and give me a nosebleed.”

  A dowdy, middle-aged woman, clutching her purse on her way out of the diner, smiled warmly at Corona, and dropped a hundred dollar bill beside her as she walked by. “What the…?” Corona said.

  “She probably heard me call you a Republican.”

  Corona shouted after her. “Hey, lady. He was being pejorative!” She craned back to Nova. “That’s the right word, right? Tell me that’s the right word.” When Nova was slow to respond, she craned her head toward the lady and shouted fruitlessly after her, “I’m a Transhumanist! He’s a…” she said, pointing to Nova, “A Green! There are no Democrats and Republicans anymore!” The lady she was yelling at wasn’t just no longer in the restaurant, she was getting into her car and flying away. The car that hadn’t been there before. The one that flew in from her home, or the airport, or wherever, based on the remote she’d pressed on her key earlier before strolling towards the diner door.

  The waiter had come with their food and left like the passing of a welcomed breeze.

  Nova smiled at Corona. “Serves you right. You order animal flesh, you get egg in your face.”

  “They grow the meat in a lab! No animal has died in the name of meat eating in at least ten years!”

  “So you get to stink of meat without PETA breathing down your neck. Only, it’s me breathing down your neck, and the smell makes me sick.” Nova bent his head over his plate and inhaled the rich, scintillating aromas of the aromatic roasted root vegetables. Getting his fill of the rosemary and thyme, the garlic and olive oil, the parsnips, turnips, and red onions, the heirloom carrots and fingerling potatoes. Brushing the odors to him with his hand like a wine connoisseur as he raised his head. All in a desperate hope to crowd out her equally aromatic antipasto dish from his lungs, with its many cheese and cured meat smells. The scents from their plates fought one another tooth and nail, just like Nova and Corona did. Finally, admitting defeat, he took out a small battery powered fan from his jacket pocket he carried with him for these occasions, set it on the table between them and aimed it at her plate, pushing the scents back over her shoulder rather than over his.

  He let his mouth water for now over the latest dish to arrive, anticipating sticking several of the vegies together at the end of his fork, biting into them, and relaxing into the explosion of tastes hitting his palate. And he spooned up the last of the appetizer that had arrived earlier.

  Corona, regarding him in action, shook her head slowly. “How did we ever become lovers?”

  “We’re the only two people who can stand one another!” He said a little too animatedly, unwittingly spitting the grape-nuts-tasting 3-D printed algae rice cake he was chewing on her like shells popping out of a Gatling gun.

  “You must be recalling some distant time from our past,” she said, wiping the gunk off her face.

  Nova smiled despite himself. He glanced over at the bus boy. Truth was he was fighting an abiding attraction to him, and, last he checked anyway, Nova was straight. That meant Bus Boy had probably sprung for the pheromone upgrade package. Can’t blame him. Not like busing tables is the aphrodisiac to women that curing cancer is.

  “Will you stop checking out the bus boy? You’r
e supposed to be proposing to me tonight.”

  “Shit, that’s right!” Nova still hadn’t peeled his eyes off of Bus Boy. “And stop doing that transhumanist voodoo thing you do, reading my mind. How is it even possible when I don’t have nanites percolating through my brain like you do?”

  “This close to you, the nanites’ hive mind electromagnetic field can interact with your unupgraded brain’s EM field, and translate your brainwave patterns for me.”

  Nova rubbed his eyes, shaking off the second trance he’d slipped into this evening, panned his head away from bus boy, aimed the same doe-eye stare at her, and said, “Marry me?”

  “Did you get the anti-aging CRISPR gene edit I asked you to get, so you’ll be nineteen forever?”

  “Ah, didn’t realize that was a deal breaker.” He leaned back on his chair and slouched.

  “Like hell, you didn’t. You were just hoping to catch me at a weak moment when I wouldn’t think to ask. Hope I’d be so hopelessly in love with you by then that the lines in your face would be deeply set before I realized I’d been had the day you proposed to me.”

  “Roid rage for eternity? Think about it, Corona. For God’s sake, please think about it.”

  “There is no God.”

  “For Techa’s sake then! That’s what you transhumanists say, isn’t it? Now that technology has become your god.” He groaned. “Can we both just stay on topic, please?”

  “You can age metabolically to like twenty-five or so to calm the roid rage, and still look nineteen forever.”

  Nova sighed. “Says the woman happy to send me to an experimental, unproven treatment that might just kill me, only so she could hold on to her artificiality.”

  Corona clenched her jaw so hard, Nova thought he heard her teeth crack. He only then realized that was someone shifting their weight one chair over. “I’m not marrying someone who’s dying,” she said, “worse yet, who refuses to accept aging as a disease. End of story.”

  “I’m sorry if I have a different philosophy of living and dying than you do. I can’t stand me on a good day. Why would I torture myself forever just so you could ensure better sex and a stiffer woody for all eternity? You’re the shallow one, not me.”

  “Kids, could you keep it down over there,” said the fourteen year old from one of the adjacent tables. From his tone, Nova gathered he was at least eighty years old and had started taking the age reversing CRISPR-RNA cocktail, and just never stopped. Maybe his goal in life was to be Baby Huey with a cigar balancing off his lips.

  Nova smiled self-deprecatingly at him, feeling duly chastised. He knew full well how he and Corona could get going and forget where they were entirely. He returned his attention to the love of his life. “It’s a Zen thing,” he explained in a lower voice.

  “Come again?”

  “I want to experience the non-attachment to my sickness and dying out of my rotting-while-still-alive carcass to ensure that I’m above it all. It’s not what life does to me but how I react to life that is the test of my humanity, and not how superhuman I can be.”

  Corona took a deep breath and held it and hit him with those eyes. He was quite familiar with the look. It was her stock and trade reaction aimed to squelch these romantic ideas of his. In the middle of being fuming mad at him she started giggling uncontrollably.

  “What?”

  “You’re glowing. Looks like they slipped the gene makeover into your food rather than give you the nano-cocktail in a pill.”

  “Yeah, I guess I should have realized the pill would just be too Tesla-Charge-and-Go.” He was referring to the kind of body and mind makeovers you could get in the checkout aisles of the Tesla car-charging minimarts. Nova gazed down at himself and smiled. He stroked his arm, secretly relieved that he didn’t feel any more reptilian or sea-creature like, which were the first creatures that came to mind that exhibited this kind of phosphorescence. In the dimly lit diner he could enjoy some of the effect. But suddenly he was itching to go someplace really dark, like just outside the restaurant where it was the dead of night.

  “Just so we’re clear,” Corona said wiping her mouth with the napkin from her lap and then sipping her wine, “you can look like this for a month or so, or until I get bored with the whole thing, but that’s it.”

  “You’re such a fascist control freak, I swear.”

  Another patron—who’d genetically modified his head to be more fish-like, with big puffy lips and a mouth that looked like it could give a horse a blow job easily—walking out the door, dropped another C-note next to Corona out of sympathy. There were plenty of holdouts from Transhuman America, refusing even to get the bacteria upgrade for their mouths that kept them from getting cavities, far less the wilder stuff. They couldn’t do much in the economy anymore besides collect UBI. So the transhumanists within earshot took pity on them and threw them money. Probably out of guilt for forcing the world to live up to their self-transcendence standards. In their minds, if they and everyone else weren’t more godlike by the day, they were letting people down. Every once in a while the perspective from the other side hit them hard though, like now; they recalled what it was like to be in the minority once upon a time, after all.

  “Come on, let’s get out of here,” Nova said.

  “Fine, since marriage is off the table,” she said, sliding her chair back.

  “Control freak,” he mumbled, standing with her. Neither of them was remotely conscious of how much or little food they’d actually eaten. They were like bad actors that couldn’t entirely get into the historical reenactment of the diner as well as the regulars.

  “You should probably skip to virtual reality level 57,” she said, referring to the virtual reality overlays they all used these days to get by. Some people, the primitives, used contacts for that, or bionic eyes. But Corona, transhumanist to the core, had imbibed the nanococktail, resulting in millions of nanobots swimming between her neural synapses. The virtual world/real world hybrid was the best available. The Green at the table, Nova wasn’t sure how he felt about that much metal infused in his body. He, predictably, had settled for the contacts. The night-glow body makeover he had just underwent, was okay in his mind, on some level, because it reminded him of many animals in nature that glowed in the dark.

  “Why do I care what’s going on at level 57?” he asked pertly.

  “If you don’t switch channels, you’re going to trip over the dead body at your feet and think it was just a bad architectural idea to put a beam on the floor for design purposes.”

  “Shit!” Nova jumped to level 57 with a thought; it was all the cuing his contacts needed. “What the…? Should someone call the police?”

  “I’ve downloaded the half a terabyte we have on him to Interpol.”

  “You scoured the mindnet already? What did you find?”

  She looked up from the body at him and gulped. Another beat and she spit it out. “He’s your father.” Another irretrievable moment of time lost as she summoned additional courage. “He was the unwitting guinea pig of some transhumanist-agenda experiment gone awry. A failed prototype. He passed those same genes on to you. The people who came after him to cover their tracks are now coming after you.”

  Her eyes went wide. “What?” he said, his throat dry and his voice tremulous. “There’s more?”

  “The information on him I had to hack through countless firewalls to find… It’s gone, and so is the data set I sent to Interpol.”

  “Please tell me you got in and out without them getting a lock on you.”

  She gulped. “I think so.”

  Nova held her gaze until she assured him that she was safe, at least for now, with her expression and her body language. Then he returned his eyes to his father’s body. Corona’s shocking bulletin was the first news to reach his ears that he had a father. He was speechless. When words did come, it was an endless stream of the same word. “Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!”

  TWO

  Realizing his body, not nearly as upgraded as
hers, was going to be out of commission for a while, owing to this quaint, antiquated notion referred to as “shock,” Corona took Nova by the arm and walked him out of the diner. If only he weren’t such a Luddite about these things, the nanococktail in his body would have neutralized the shock response and he could get on with the rest of his life without missing a beat. Only there was no such nanococktail in his body. And she knew if she slipped him one it’d be a relationship killer she wouldn’t come back from.

  She hacked the airbike hovering outside the diner, strapped him into the passenger seat behind her and, with him drooling over her shoulder, sped off. His arms placed around her waist by Corona herself. She next hacked the airbike owner’s bank account and deposited enough money for three airbikes, BMWs no less.

  Playing daredevil on the bike, she sped into the opposing air currents, figuring he could use the extra breeze in his face to ground him. Knowing he wasn’t coherent enough to not simply fall off the bike, she’d ordered the nano in his gloves to stitch themselves to his leather jacket and to one another, essentially putting him into bondage. Her nano-infused mind gave her telepresence with most anything nano-infused, allowing her to hack the hive minds in question. She then did corkscrews, nosedives, took him on a real hell ride, figuring it would bring him into the moment.

  The medicine seemed to be working. He was coming around. The shift to increased alertness was marked by a movement along the spectrum of his now phosphorescent skin’s countless hues. The lighter hues were brightening at the expense of the darker hues. As noted in her side view mirrors. He was better than a headlight on the airbike for keeping other airbikers and aircars from crashing into them.

  Corona dropped one of the headsets from the bike onto him and another onto herself and lowered the speaker to its rightful position at their lips for both of them. There was no point shouting over the wind. The mikes would also come with noise cancelation technology to help filter out the sound of the wind and other ambient noises, such as the throttling bike.