The God Gene (Age of Abundance Book 2) Read online

  She chuckled inside her head. “Lucky I have you then.”

  “It’s what I’ve been saying all along.”

  “We better break this off. I just okayed some guy’s multi-billion dollar project and I have no idea what he said, or why I agreed to it after scanning his mind to see past the bullshit.”

  “Yeah, okay. You go deal with the real world. I’ll see what I can dig up on this as-of-yet anonymous corporation hunting Nova. Five’ll get you twenty they sent someone to us at some point for project funding. There’s a clue buried in there somewhere.”

  Corona smiled. “You do that.” It was another of Gecko’s favorite ploys. When he wasn’t playing hacker games with her mind, he was ballroom dancing perfectly in sync with her. So if she had to put her mind elsewhere, she didn’t lose any downtime on problems of greater concern to her. His goal was to merge with her so completely she couldn’t tell where she ended and he began. He would be indistinguishable from her left-brain, her better half, critiquing, fault-finding every wildly inspirational idea she had to protect her mind from being hacked, stress-testing every perimeter wall she put up for weaknesses, just like a good left-brain does for the right side of the brain. And when she had to think her way out of the lockbox of her mind he put her in, after he’d penetrated those defenses, she would be the one to have to stress test the prison. She would appreciate then how no one knew her mind better than he did, and no one sacrificed more for her, as he was doing now, putting her concerns ahead of his. It was just how a chess master would try to woo a fellow chess master. Only mind games just weren’t her thing. She wanted to grow her mind so she could be more in touch with life, not so she could be more lost up inside her head, or his, for that matter.

  She severed the telepathic link to him and rewound the tapes in her mind to replay the conversation that had just taken place, and her examination of Mr. Ungerman’s mind. It had been part of her job, ironically, enough, to hack past all his defenses to make sure he was not holding out on her. Clients tended to downplay the weaknesses in their plans, insisting the project was years or months from fruition when in fact it was decades. Something you couldn’t find out without digging into their fears. Only thing was her clients came with neural nets all their own. Her day job very much forced her to play Gecko’s game. One more reason not to take it home with her, even if Gecko never tired of such games.

  Mr. Felix Ungerman had already exited the room. Of course, she was no longer in real time. So to her, their conversation and her interrogation was just beginning.

  ***

  “We’re rather proud of this one,” Felix Ungerman said. He turned his laptop to face Corona. “It’s one of those wrist-worn drones that you twist the dial on and it flies off to take selfies of you kayaking or mountain climbing. Only, our model, flies back towards the sender, grabs hold of his face, and using the helicopter blades… well, you can see for yourself.”

  Corona watched as the helicopter blades mowed through the hiker’s face. In the middle of enjoying his die-for mountain top view, he had been attacked by what seemed like a giant wasp. When the drone was done it flew off to the nearest river, doused itself of all evidence of blood, then returned to the man’s arm as if it had never left it.

  “Here’s the thing,” Corona said. “We just don’t have the pressing need to assassinate people like we used to. Just easier to hack their minds. Most people have a mindchip or a nanococktail they’ve imbibed so the nanites can lodge themselves between neural synapses. Of course, there are a lot of folks around with the older models, the mind meshes that drape the entire brain and read its standing waves to translate what the person’s thinking well enough to interact with the planetary mindnet. It’s supposed to just read their minds, but it’s easy enough to hack it so it massages people’s thinking in the directions we like.”

  “With you, with you. Not a problem.” He turned his laptop towards him, keyed up some other folders to get them to pop then pivoted the screen back at her. Corona couldn’t shake the impression that Felix Ungerman was a Fuller Brush salesman in another life. Or a door to door bible broker. If those shop vacs that used nanites to whisk away all your pesky messes ever became the rage again, and the commission was better, she had no doubt he’d be peddling those. It wasn’t that he lacked the necessary enthusiasm, it was just a little too manufactured. And he a little too professional. The impeccable suit, not just the tailoring, but the cinching of his tie, the cufflinks and the shirt sleeves beneath the jacket just so; it was old school. No one had the time to look that well put together anymore. Not even a fleet of human or robot attendants to dress him could ever justify the time. Most folks just wore self-cleaning clothes they didn’t even have to take off to wash, and fabrics that changed color and shape in response to different social situations. Still, you had to admire any guy trying this hard to make his way in the world, when it would have just been easier to sit at home, collect UBI, and stare hang-jawed at the television screen or holovision determined to get him to make something of himself with the latest human upgrade come on. “You, too, can fly for only ten percent commission on any superhero saves you charge for.” “You too can climb K-9 with our super-duper dandy…” “No reason to feel like a slouch in music class. Be the next Mozart with a nanococktail you can pick up at the nearest Tesla-Charge-And-Go.” Sooner or later one of those come-ons would be the one just right for you, tapping into whatever your idea of giving back to the greater good was by promising to let you become the person you always wanted to be. You’d be rich, everyone would love you, ya-da, ya-da, ya-da.

  Felix Ungerman started in with his next polished spiel, sensing when she was finished getting lost in her head. Turned out the neural net inside her brain was so good at emulating the responses of the real her, it even got lost in its own digressions from time to time. “It’s a universal hacker, kind of a skeleton key that opens any door. Doesn’t matter how primitive or advanced the technology, the AI keeps tinkering until it’s in. Most models it can access without any tinkering at all. But if it’s something new it hasn’t come across before, anywhere from a matter of minutes to hours. Took three days once to hack the model 17A military bot, but since then the self-evolving algorithms have just gotten fast at accessing even more advanced models.”

  She watched the video display on the laptop even as his finger hovered over the “holo” key in case she’d prefer the presentation to fill up the entire cubicle they were in. Not everyone cared for that much immersion, insisting, as she did, it just diminished the critical faculties.

  A juggler juggling bowling pins on the Atlanta boardwalk stopped what he was doing. Took a pin in each hand and clubbed to death the kids that were clapping for him and giggling. The parents tried to pull him off the kids but he tossed the adults so hard, they landed to burst like water balloons. “Of course, we paid to rebuild them,” Felix said reassuringly, and “gave them some self-empowerment tech by way of additional compensation. Not that you can ever entirely undo something like that. Some of the parents fear their kids are no longer their kids but walk-ins, some other entity that has taken over the nano-reconstituted bodies. Techa, give me strength.”

  Juggler, the crime committed, fled into the ocean, jumping the dock into the water, and promptly swimming until he’d antagonized some shark enough to get himself eaten. The blood in the water caused a feeding frenzy, which destroyed the rest of the evidence of his ever having been on earth. The quad copters filming his performance for future self-critiquing had followed him into the water to document his end. Not that they needed to. The shoreline, as most of the ocean, these days, was populated with mini-camera-subs that kept an eye out for polluters and over-fishing and other ocean marauders. Upon witnessing their master’s death, the quad copters politely committed suicide, dissolving into dust that settled to the ocean floor, putting an end to the rest of the evidence of what had gone down. That could have been on account of a hack Felix had seen to, or it could have been something the performan
ce artist programmed into them, not wanting his work stolen if something untoward happened to him.

  In the next video clip, a blind man, walking with a cane up a city sidewalk, heard hooligans coming after him before he saw them. Before they could put their grubby mitts on him, he took off at a run. He scampered up a traffic light post. Jumped from there to the telephone lines crossing the street, which he ran across in a great high-wire act, keeping his balance as he put one foot directly in front of the other.

  The hoodlums, not believing what they were seeing, were more provoked than put off. “That faker! Pilfering money from people we could have stolen ourselves!” The teens ran after him. But he kept evading them with his rooftop antics, running along the ridges of buildings that would have terrified a sighted man, all with the same high-wire-act balancing skills performed earlier.

  When the thugs caught up with him, coming at him from different directions, he used urban acrobatics to get back to street level and find another path of escape. The comic book hero, Daredevil, had nothing on this guy.

  The teens, for their part, must have been acting students doing some reenactment. There were no street gangs anymore, and any petty crime for that matter. Even the throwback communities like the Amish—there were hundreds of them, tech hold-out refuges against the future, many founded for religious purposes, others by backwards looking types who saw salvation in the past, not the future, in simpler, less tech-ridden lives—feared to commit crimes like she was seeing on her monitor. As it would just give the City AI all the excuse it needed to rescue the wayward youth with self-empowerment upgrades that would give them all the mind power they needed to make all the money they wanted. Away from the influence of the parents and their backwards-looking communities.

  “We actually just got him over his fear of heights,” Felix said. “The blind man already had the bat-like radar upgrades. And well, we helped with the urban acrobatics too.”

  “You’re closer to the mark this time, Felix. We might have use for a product like this. But it’s got to be able to do more than simply give us access to someone’s mind. And when it comes to changing their behavior… well, we have less people running around with ‘how to blow up the world’ ideas floating through their mind than we used to. It was a fad that had its day. These days, it’s more about motivating people to commit to re-inventing the world with a kind of passion that leads people to obsession. That leads them to forego a cushy-cushy world where everything dazzles the mind, everything intrigues and engages, and it’s easier just to be a consumer, to sit back and take it all in. Why produce the next big thing when you’re dying to try all the other big things already out there?”

  “You’re afraid of the economy crashing?”

  “The Singularity effect requires everyone keep creating with the prolificness of a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates or an Anthon Sewella. The wave crashes, the pace of progress slows, the instant people stop viewing self-transcendence as the ultimate aim of life.”

  “But surely that’s hard-wired in. No incentives required.”

  “Here’s the thing. We find that throughout childhood and adolescence, through much of life in fact, the tendency for the tree to branch out in any and all directions is healthy, it’s part of being, well, a well-balanced tree. But the trunk itself has to have an overall singular direction.”

  “Surely that’s the case.”

  “Yes, but let’s say the person discovers, in the course of exploring all those new get-over-themselves technologies out there that they love being a marksman. They couldn’t shoot to save their lives prior to drinking the nano-cocktail or getting the VR-training head gear, or the mindchip or what have you from the smorgasbord of options out there. Now that they’ve discovered their passion is to shoot, all they want to do is become a better sniper, a better shooter that can deliver that shot to the target no matter what the obstacle. Did you know there are over a million tech-savvy solutions to turn you into not just the best shooter that anyone has ever seen on the planet in any category, but in all categories?”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Yeah, it’s crazy. The point is, now the person’s gone down some rabbit hole and we’ll never see them again, unless, of course, it’s to kill someone in some spectacular way.”

  “And what if society just doesn’t need another ace marksman? It really does nothing for the greater good. I’m tracking you now.”

  “I believe you are, Mr. Ungerman.”

  “You want our company to tweak the software so the person senses his place in the cosmic scheme of things better.” He nodded and his eyes went inward. “Fascinating problem. Tempting to consider a top-down approach, though, rather than a bottom-up one. Who but an AI powerful enough to tap into everyone’s mind on the planet, know their heart of hearts, to pull something like this off?”

  Corona sighed. “No one is going to let that happen. That’s all we need, to create the next generation lifeform that leaves us in the dust to remain the relative ants we are forever, or worse, enslave us to its uber-will or simply wipe us out.”

  “You could program it to be benign.”

  “Program a superior intelligence to do what we want? Not even we’re that desperate for control to believe that isn’t a formula for disaster.” She took a long breath and held it before letting it out. “What if I told you we are all connected on a quantum level? Not just with one another as fellow human beings, but with every spec of creation, every animal, every tree. Hell with aliens out in the cosmos, wherever they may be. We just don’t have enough processing power even now on a conscious level to do much with that information. But on an unconscious level…”

  “You see the unconscious mind as the go-between between you and the quantum realm, able to parse through this much information in real time. You wouldn’t be the first to believe this. Certainly every artist who came before you has argued as much. Still, as a scientist, making anything practicable or workable from that idea…”

  “We’re finding, Mr. Ungerman, that people with quantum mind chips have figured out how to bridge the communication gap between the unconscious quantum realm and the conscious realm as well as any artist and to self-correct their life course accordingly. And they’re doing it better than seasoned Zen masters and transcendental meditators and any other old school ploy you could come up with to the same ends.”

  “So stick a quantum chip in everyone’s brain and be done with it.” Felix wiped his arm across the table as if he were dusting off her idea every bit as readily.

  She laughed. “Even if we could get everyone to agree on the same upgrade path, which will never happen because each person’s personality and screwy belief systems disposes them to one path over another—did you know there are people out there that for religious reasons will only wear their augmented abilities as some form of skullcap so they can take it off at night—I know, crazy right? What you gonna do? Force enlightenment on people and it just creates a police state. Not that we mind police states, but they tend not to be very productive. Nothing crashes the Singularity wave faster, and then you’ve just handed the other country, or corporations or individuals the power they need to walk all over you.”

  “What’s wrong with the quantum chip that even if you could get everyone to upgrade to one it wouldn’t solve your problem?”

  “It’s unhackable.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t have to be hacked, if what you say is true. If God’s will—for lack of a better term—bubbles up from the quantum realm so the individual can act as the hands of God. Again, apologies for using an outdated metaphor...”

  Coronoa leaned in. “Here’s the problem. Sticking with your analogy, if God wanted this to be a one-man show, He’d have created us all with quantum mind chips, end of problem. You need both top-down leadership like we’re contemplating here with bottom-up leadership; they’re two halves of a whole. Try to run a world entirely from a grass roots level and you’ve got a problem; it’s called chaos. Try to run it from the top
down exclusively, and you’ve got fascism. See our problem?”

  “I believe I do. You want us to give everyone access to this quantum realm, just using more hackable wetware. I believe that’s doable. But it’s going to cost you. The less time you want this solution in, the more money it’s going to cost you, and it’s already going to cost a lot.”

  She shrugged and gestured with her hands in one. “Money we got. Turns out no one really needs it anymore and there’s damn little to spend it on, even if you have it. Unless you just want to become a collector of self-empowerment technologies, a museum curator of some kind. If so, you can bet any one of those technologies in your gallery will have made someone a fortune that they too do not know what to spend it on. Hell, if you can’t afford something, anyone will give you whatever human upgrade you want for their ten percent off the top of the proceeds come time to apply your newfound inventiveness to bettering the world. Buckminster Fuller is doing his happy dance from his grave. He told us as much about this coming Age of Abundance over a century ago.”

  “Yeah, but the moneyless world is built on good will and an AI parsing the actual benefits to the greater good in monetary terms of your creations so you can then trade those chits to get whatever else you want. Not sure you’re going to get too many goodwill points for this project.”

  “Actually,” Corona said, shifting in her seat, “I’m thinking this might blow every other project out of the water as far as accumulating good will. Think, everyone exquisitely attuned to the needs of the greater good not just unconsciously, but consciously, and not just a slave to it, but able to figure out how to put one’s individual talents to use in such a way that they can truly be all they can be. Perfectly self-serving and self-sacrificing at the same time. How much better a world is this than simply the one percent walking around with quantum mind chips being so exquisitely attuned?”