The God Gene - YA Version Read online

  “F-me,” Nova mumbled. He was gazing at the panda with his jaw hanging open.

  “Watch your language. This is the kiddy section of the forest, remember?” She decided it would be more productive to address the bear than Nova in the state he was in. Good call. “Um, is your brain a CRISPR-machine as well?” she asked the panda.

  “Yes, of course. Otherwise I couldn’t speak the various languages of the kids passing through. Some languages like Spanish, for instance, require you to be able to roll your tongue, which is a different genetic alteration than many people have, than all bears, certainly.” He rolled his tongue to demonstrate.

  “But if you’re that high functioning, you must be bored out of your mind babysitting these kids?”

  “Nah, I mostly surf the mindnet, engage in some internet dalliances with my girlfriend in China.”

  She bit her lip in an effort to contain her smile. Her eyes watered. “It’s like ninety degrees out here. How’s that fur suit working out for you?”

  “I made myself cold blooded,” the bear explained, “when I woke up this morning. New it was going to be a b-i-t-c-h of a day otherwise.”

  She missed the beat on that comment, falling prey to the same slack-jaw phenomenon that had caught up Nova. Finally, she said, “Techa, please tell me this is just me hallucinating on account of the spiked pollen, courtesy of the supersentient forest realizing I needed to get over myself for feeling so useless in the face of all these unclassified lifeforms.”

  “’Fraid not,” the bear replied. “That’s not how this forest was designed. The kids require a more tactile experience. They’re up in their heads enough already.”

  “Bye, Mr. Bear,” Nova said. He’d had about enough of the talking bear too. There were plenty of Greens who supported any take on nature, just so there was more nature, and less cement jungle. He wasn’t one of those. He supposed he was a bit of a Luddite when it came to his take on nature conservancy.

  “I’m not sure how much help I’m going to be to you, Nova,” Mercedes said as they hiked on toward the rogue ant colony. “If I can barely recognize the species, I can’t exactly posit a solution to whatever has gotten our ant colony out of whack.”

  “We’ve got budget approval from the higher ups to call in however many group minds we need to solve this problem if we can’t handle it. This isn’t your ordinary magical forest. These former Park Avenue bastards are worth cagillions. And if they want their forest to be more inviting than Disneyland for their kids, so be it.”

  “Holy shit!” she said, looking up from her scanner.

  They’d found their ant colony.

  ***

  The army ants had already devoured a big chunk of the forest. “I’m guessing this isn’t normal for these guys,” Nova said.

  “No shit, Sherlock.” Mercedes held her scanner towards the ants, tried to process what she was seeing.

  Nova’s eyes told him that the social insects were surrounding anything moving, up to and including large animals, and carrying them off. Some into the trees, where their prey hung suspended like flies in a spider web. Other creatures the ants were transporting underground. The animals fought and carried on but ultimately they could do nothing. Nova wasn’t sure if they just gave up after a while, or if the ants were secreting some kind of narcotic. He stopped debating the point when the ants swarmed around them from all directions, cutting of any hope of escape.

  Mercedes saw the ants crawling up her legs and tossed the scanner to Nova. “They’re not interested in you for some reason.”

  Nova hesitated to mention that Corona had placed certain protections around him. Especially since he had no idea how they worked or how he could recruit them into helping Mercedes. “Stay calm,” he said.

  He sent out a distress call over the scanner. “I need access to any and all group minds with free mind power now! I’m a forest manager and my partner is being carried off by army ants. She’s not the only one. They appear to be devouring every living thing in this sector of the forest.” He stopped talking long enough for someone to answer.

  Seconds that felt like minutes later the mike crackled. He panicked thinking all he was going to get back was static hiss. But then… “This is Level 1. Sector 33. We’re on it,” came the male voice on the other end. Nova knew what that meant. The group minds were nested at levels. Most were at level one. You exhausted the mind power at that level without getting an answer to your question, you got bumped to level two, with quantum measures more mind power, assuming they found the problem interesting enough or with far-reaching enough implications. If they couldn’t handle the problem without recruiting more mind power you got bumped up to level 3. Now you were rocking three levels of mind power in the global mind. There were nine levels altogether. By level nine the entire planetary interlinked consciousness and all of mindnet was involved. The fact that Nova had gotten the Sector 33 designation meant he’d just gotten one of the group minds at level one. It would be them that would decide if his problem warranted more mind power.

  ***

  Derrick had already repurposed one of the numberless G.O.L.E.M. micro-satellites in the sector Nova was in. “What the hell?” he said looking at the images popping up.

  Teresa leaned over his shoulder. Her scent a mix of new car leather and jasmine. The leather odor coming from her action-figure bodysuit, which pretty much pegged her as a field agent wannabe. The jasmine was no doubt coming from her nano-infested underarms responding to her thoughts regarding her favorite fragrance of the moment. “Yeah, that forest has definitely been hacked.”

  “Could just be the ant hive mind that’s been hacked.”

  “No way the forest’s supersentience would stand for that,” Teresa said, nibbling on a doughnut. His mouth watered with the taste of the lemon merengue-filled chocolate doughnut she was eating, his body nano manufacturing the same tastes and textures against his tongue for him in sympathy with her, so he wouldn’t have to ask her to share her doughnut and blow his whole health-nut cover.

  “The ants are ignoring Nova,” Derrick said, pulling down everything he had on him from the mindnet and loading it onto his quantum mindchip.

  “Could be they’re just interested in female lifeforms,” Teresa suggested. “If you want to do the most damage to a given population, go after the reproducing females.”

  “At the rate that ant population is growing? They hardly need to worry about the females dropping their payload. Besides, why mess with your food source?”

  “Could we dial down the screaming from the chick being devoured by ants already?” Theresa said, clamping her palms against her ears. “I’m trying to think.”

  Derrick dialed down the volume on the monitor. “What’s the AI say about all this?”

  Teresa panned her head to take in the server farm forming the walls around them, and the mazelike configuration of walls beyond those on this and the upper levels. They were inside their own library of congress of sorts, only the only “books” Level 1, Sector 33 stored were computer chips held together in vast arrays. “From the way she’s lighting up, I’d say she’s rather intrigued with the problem.”

  They both returned their eyes to the monitor. “Looks like she’s hacked her way into the army ant hive mind.”

  “A hell of a lot of good that’ll do us if the problem is happening at the ecosystem level,” Derrick balked.

  “Switch to 3D holo.”

  Derrick brought up holovision mode and they put on their visors. “She got in via the microbes on the ants and their victims. Nice.”

  “We have CRISPRs that are functional at that level?”

  “Yeah, of course. They’re hive-mind arrayed to give them whatever mind power they need to address the problem. They just have to be activated by the supersentience overseeing the forest. Being as it has been hacked, SALLY stepped in.” SALLY was the name of the Level 1, Sector 33 AI.

  “Techa, can you imagine an age where lifeforms weren’t self-hacking? With or without an external stimulus? Must have been hell,” Teresa bemoaned.

  “She’s really wrestling to regain control of the CRISPR units those ants are using for minds. Whatever’s got control of the CRISPRs seems to be counterhacking her as rapidly as she gets in.”

  Teresa and Derrick took their eyes off the 3D holo and stared at one another, and then they pulled the visors off. “Shit!” they both said at the same time.

  Derrick got on the comm. “One of our Level 1 AIs has been hacked. It’s being used to sabotage the Magic Forest project in quadrant 32 dash A dash 17.” He waited for someone from Level 2 to respond. He was swallowing spit repeatedly and his right leg was bouncing a mile a minute. However long he’d been waiting for a response, it was long enough to notice his newly formed coping mechanism.

  He stared at the digital clock. “Level 1, we’ve addressed the issue,” came the female voice at the other end speaking for Level 2, Sector 117, according to Derrick’s monitor. “You’re good to go. You were right about the Level 1 hack, by the way. It was sector 5137 causing the problems.”

  Derrick’s clock said thirteen seconds had elapsed since he’d placed the call. Teresa and Derrick looked at one another. “Shiiiiiiit,” they said at the same time. “Must be nice to be a Level 2,” Theresa said.

  “What kind of ungodly power they’re working with to solve a problem that is intractable at our level in thirteen seconds?”

  “Actually, three seconds. It took the other ten to exhaust the rest of Level 1’s computational availability with its idling CPU chips.” Teresa pointed to their dashboard as evidence. “What made you think the hack was of Level 1 and not of the forest’s ubermind?”

  Derrick was the senior agent in charge, so he was used to fielding these logistics questions from the junior team members. “Sally has algorithms at her disposal for hacking that would be totally foreign to a forestry ubermind. There’s no way, if the ecosystem’s supersentience were the source of the problem, it could counterhack her that fast. It might put up a good fight, considering the bulk of its algorithms are self-evolving but…”

  “Got you,” she said nodding.

  Derrick took a deep breath and let it out. He returned his eyes to the monitor. The overgrowth of army ants had died off so fast, the supersentient forest sent a breeze into the area to clear them away. On occasion it could ask and be granted permission to control its own weather based on need. Whatever was going on with the atmospheric nano cloud supersentiences in the vicinity, they didn’t mind procuring the magic to assist a forest in need.

  The animals were dropping from the trees, or crawling out of the ground where they’d been kept in suspended animation for whatever purposes. Derrick didn’t feel the need to look into whatever intel had been dredged up on how the ants’ behavior had been altered. He was more interested in the hackers that had done the job than in how they’d pulled off the magic. The Level 1 AI running sector 33 would have already closed the loophole pertaining to deficient coding as would have all the Level 1 AIs to make sure a similar problem didn’t require recruiting Level 2 mind power in the future.

  Derrick picked up the comm. “How are things at your end, Nova?”

  ***

  Nova was still dusting the dead ants off of Mercedes. It was like peeling the wrapper off of a sex doll that had arrived in the mail. Replete with perfect muscle tone and 36-24-36 contours. To say nothing of the alabaster skin and long straight blond hair Nova couldn’t stop imagining her whipping him with as she flicked her head at him, like in one of his favorite low-rent, low-grade martial arts holo vids. She was coming around just fine, damn her, interrupting the movie playing out in his head.

  Nova picked up the scanner and talked into it. “She’ll be back to normal in under a minute, I’m guessing. Next time don’t be so good at your job. I could stand to take advantage of her in her semi-intoxicated state.”

  He heard a chuckle at the other end and a, “Thanks for flying the friendly skies. Enjoy the rest of your day.” Then the mike went dead, conveying the severed connection.

  ***

  “What’s got your dick all twisted in a knot?” Teresa asked, scratching the stubble of his two-day old beard for him when she saw him picking at it. The fact that he could grow a convincing five o’clock shadow even if it took him two days to do it was probably as good a reason for labeling him “senior partner” around here as any. They had matching red curly hair that they absently ran their hands through thinking through thornier problems. Sometimes they’d even catch one another twisting one another’s curls instead of their own and pull away embarrassed. He was guessing his blank stare and unblinking eyes had given him away this time, not the hair curling.

  “Whoever hacked into a Level 1 sector wasn’t just some Quantum-chip upgraded dufus,” Derrick said.

  “I don’t know. I hear those latest upgrades are pretty potent.”

  “Not enough to outmaneuver all of Level 1. No, there’s only one explanation.”

  They turned and looked at one another and said in the same instant, “Corporate.”

  “Let’s see if we can put a name to them,” Derrick said.

  “To say nothing of a motive.”

  FIVE

  Otto threw some bread crumbs at his ducks. He was getting close to the end of the offerings in the bag. Soon his little relaxation ritual would be at an end. He glanced up from the birds’ feverish attempts to peck the last of the crust slices from the water, over the edge of the infinity pool rimming his penthouse balcony. Staring glazy-eyed at the horizon. The skyscrapers rose before him like shapely, swirling glass sculptures in his own private Zen garden of nothing but brushed stone and glass. Considering he owned the most magnificent towers, and the rest were just growing up like weeds between them, it was just a matter of tending the garden to get nature back in balance.

  “I’m afraid there’s been a problem, sir,” his chief of security said, crassly interrupting his quiet vigil with his basso profondo voice, as he stepped through the sliding glass doors onto the patio.

  “Yes, I know,” Otto replied.

  “He appears to have a protector. What do you propose, sir?”

  “That we take a trials of Hercules approach. See what tricks she has up her sleeve that might serve us well against future adversaries through a series of tests.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll see to it.”

  “No, that’s okay, Max. I’ll see to it,” Otto said, throwing the last of the crumbs at the ducks and smiling. He’d finally hit the sweet spot of his serenity campaign, feeling as centered as he was ever likely going to feel.

  Max, the largest Chinese gentleman Otto had ever seen—he’d have made a great linebacker—bowed to Otto and slipped back through the sliding glass doors which he closed behind him. The sound of the sliding door was indistinguishable from the blade of a guillotine falling on a head. Otto had had it serviced several times until he could get the sound just right.

  He held out his hand and the ducks dissolved into small black nano clouds that swarmed like bees briefly before merging with his hand. The bag he was feeding them the crumbs from, it too burst into nano dust and swirled about before reforming with his body.

  Otto got up and walked back inside his apartment through the closed sliding glass doors, as if they just weren’t there.

  SIX

  The sign at the edge of the complex read, DARPA. It was short for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Somewhere buried inside the complex was Building 41. And somewhere buried inside Building 41 was Corona. She was sitting opposite a Mr. Felix Ungerman. It was her job to interview him. He had come with a proposal in search of DARPA funding. He in return was supposed to tantalize her with what he could do to ensure America kept its technological and military edge against other countries, other special ops agencies, hell, against Felix the cat if the cat was deemed too damn smart for its own good.

  In the room over was Gecko. He had the same job as Corona. For a while in fact they’d been lovers. She broke it off. He was too into head games. In front of him was a woman who in many respects was no different than Mr. Felix Ungerman. Except her name was Alicia Bounds. And her proposal, though dramatically different than Mr. Ungerman’s, was in many respects, entirely the same. It was Gecko’s and Corona’s jobs to listen to them drone on without their eyes glazing over. It was a government job. Eyes glazed over, even if every idea put to them was as out there as throwing comets at Mars to help move terraforming along. Or decommissioning HAARP in Alaska in favor of a more advanced planetary shield against aliens. Honestly, there was only so many times you could get your mind blown before even the crazy stuff started sounding mundane.

  Which was why, for now at least, Gecko and Corona really weren’t listening. They were running their minds on autopilot, letting their neural nets ask the appropriate questions so that Felix Ungerman and Alicia Bounds could feel like they were being taken seriously. Meanwhile, Gecko and Corona powwowed over more serious matters, telepathically. Since they both had cutting edge neural nets, getting into one another’s minds was a relatively simple matter, even through the Faraday cages that the rooms were supposed to be.