Terraforming Earth - Phase 2: "Humanoids in Sealed Habitats": Futurescape, #2

By Dean C. Moore

When steering human evolution with designer plagues proves too dangerous out in the open, people are herded into domed cities. There experiments can begin on them in earnest. Sing-Sing is tasked with containing the Singularity effect, making sure that the explosive release of creative energy continues to serve only the top one percent instead of creating an Age of Abundance. Nano Metro is tasked with preparing humanoids to migrate to the genesis ships in low orbit, where their guided evolution will continue to ensure they will one day be fit to occupy every environmental niche in the cosmos.

With the Earth quickly headed in the direction of its former pristine Garden of Eden state, and plans for conquering the cosmos virtually overnight well in hand thanks to a well-managed Singularity effect, Garrett Rawlings, Simone Bolivar, and the rest of the FutureScape corporate and military-industrial complex super-alliance ought to be able to relax. But they quickly realize that playing masters of the universe games pits them against alien civilizations with far more experience in this area. If they can't hide the fact that Earth has entered Singularity state until they're ready to fight a war for dominion of the cosmos, they'll be blown off the map before the game has even started. It's the first time that the all-powerful Garrett Rawlings and his lover, Simone, whose mind entered singularity state long ago, have ever played the roles of the underdogs.

Garrett and Simone face ever-increasing problems on the home front as well. The resistance, led by Rake Cunningham and Doc Holiday, is coming on strong. If Garrett and Simone aren't careful, the Age of Abundance they've worked so hard to forestall could come around sooner than anyone imagined. And that would mean a total loss of control--the one thing Garrett and Simone will not tolerate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dean C. Moore
• Release date: Oct 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9798215716328

Book preview

ONE

SING-SING (SINGULARITY CONTAINMENT COMPOUND) – SOME MONTHS FROM NOW

Geisha Girl Kishi gazed up at the fortress of a home, which couldn’t be assailed by a droid squadron, with no trepidation at all in regard to her mission; she would not fail to kill her mark as others had.

As the gate opened for her, she took her first constrained step, hemmed in by the tight fitting geisha outfit that would make walking the winding cobblestone trail up the mountain most trying.  She would have been well-advised not to arrive in costume, but getting into character from now had certain advantages.  The slow ascent, stopping to inhale the delightful aroma of each flower, to appreciate the elaborate Zen gardens—the entire mountain had been terraformed to the highest artistic standards—would mean countless opportunities to spy strengths and weaknesses in Doctor Vanguard’s defenses; it would assist her retreat once the deed was done.  Getting out of here alive was going to be a lot harder than getting in, that much was certain.

The Dobermans, posed calmly and statuesquely throughout the gardens like the Pharaoh hounds of old on which their genetics were partially based, studied her every movement.  They were trained to move about the complex gardenscape without disturbing so much as a shrub.  Genetically upgraded, enhanced with nano, they had the jaw crushing capacity of African lions.  Though the garden theme areas trailing up the mountain lacked no shortage of actual lions and tigers, black panthers, and other sleek, nimble-footed predators.  The steeper areas, where the rock cliffs were sheer, sported several species of mountain goats with elaborate horns.  They eyed her every bit as keenly.  No less upgraded than any of the other animals.  All the creatures were here to do a lot more than look pretty and complement the garden.  They had human-grade intelligence and they were chosen to replace humans and androids as security because of their ability to get up and down the mountain’s treacherous landscape far better than any biped.  It would be one more thing to consider during her hasty retreat from the home later; she had already slipped twice on the slimy, moss-coated rocks.  The two android guards, modeled to look exactly like humans, assisting her, saw to it that she did not land face down on the ground. 

The traction in their feet was maintained by magnetic soles, which could afford to ignore the relatively frictionless surface of the moss-coated rocks in favor of the high magnetite content of the rocks themselves.  The slippery surfaces of the rocks were another deterrent against thieves and murderers; moreover, the magnetic field generated by the rocks was expected to make upgraded humans dizzy and disoriented, and interfere with the chipheads whose augmented mental computations could be confounded by the magnetic fields if the fields were tuned just so.  Kishi’s mindchip informed her that they had been tuned just so; if it weren’t for her Zen training, she would have succumbed already, alerting her host as to her enhancements.

She stopped, auspiciously to smell the fragrance of a most sublime flower put at the trail’s side for the guest’s appreciation.  Genetically enhanced, it would change its fragrance at the first detection of fear, hostility, any negative emotion actually, and depending on the extent of that negative emotion, would secrete a paralytic, stopping the party dead in their tracks—dead as in not a figure of speech, as a biological fact.  Kishi’s mindchip informed her that the entire mountain was blooming with color precisely to ensure that a cloud of mixed gases saturated the air the instant an intruder entertained unwholesome thoughts for their host.  The gases emitted by the flowering plants were just varied enough to circumvent any countermeasure; the flowers included species that emitted acid into the air that ate through air masks and nano-lined lungs.

Kishi zoomed her eyes to see if the soil contained any surprises.  Not all threats would be visible to the naked, unaugmented eye.  Her mindchip quickly sorted the plethora of microbial life forms.  She made sure to expose those beneath the surface by tripping unavoidably, as arguably, the more lethal varieties would be the ones most likely to be disturbed by running and not walking feet.  Her eyes could scan better than the most sophisticated microscopes that would have cost many millions of dollars just a few years ago.  Were it not for the mindchip, the extra visual acuity would only have led to information overload.  The news was much as she feared.  The various forms of flesh-eating bacteria could devour anything in a matter of minutes, better than submerging the person in a vat of lye.  The synthetic skin of a droid, the titanium underframe of a hybrid; it hardly mattered.  It appeared that Dr. Vanguard had thought of everything. 

He had every reason to be this paranoid and this protected.  He was a walking singularity effect.  His prodigious mind for inventions was capable of landing on one runaway technology after another; anyone of them capable of triggering its own singularity.  He was FutureScape’s persona non grata; number one on their hit list.  Dr. Vanguard reputedly fended off over a dozen attempts on his life a day.  All without missing a beat.  Even so, his days were likely numbered.  FutureScape was at work on a super-sentient AI to oversee the city, according to the black internet.  Once on line and fully operational, Dr. Vanguard could expect hundreds of attacks against him per hour.  No human mind, upgraded or not, could fend off that kind of assault.  Which made her presence here rather unnecessary.  But FutureScape was not content to wait.  The whole reason for Sing-Sing’s existence was to contain the singularity, to keep the genie in the bottle, make it serve the purposes of the top one percent, not the bottom ninety-nine percent of humanity. 

It was the dawn of the Age of Abundance, but the old world order was not prepared to shed its Age of Scarcity thinking.  And so, here she was, bucking history, and the odds.  FutureScape was doomed to fail in its agenda, of course, but not without creating a rising sea of suffering that would catch up every last person on earth—including FutureScape.  Fortunately for her, her philosophical temperament was limited to a subroutine buried far down in her hierarchy of priorities established by the mindchip itself.  Making it all the easier to put one foot in front of the other up the mountain despite the treacherous terrain.

Kishi continued documenting what she was up against as she closed in on the castle cut into the top of the mountain, a sight that would have been entirely at home in a medieval setting, like one of those ancient monasteries.  No doubt, looks would prove deceiving there as well, and the castle came with no shortage of upgrades.

She sent sonic probes deep into the ground, using the implants in her feet.  Once again it was as she feared.  The artificial mountain, done to scale to fit within the geodesic dome, albeit rising high enough to freely support a flying armada of eagles and hawks with eyes that emitted lasers, had a failsafe mechanism.  Should all other deterrents prove ineffective, it could trigger an earthquake, bringing the mountain itself down on the would-be killer.

In her peripheral vision, one of the overflying hawks took out an intruder who’d managed to crawl a third of the way up the mountain by emitting lasers from its eyes.  The man had a bodysuit on that hid his scent and made his temperature low enough on the surface not to excite the snakes.  A headband affected his brainwaves and kept his mind blank so thoughts of what he intended to do did not betray him to the gas-emitting flowers.  The precautions had all been for naught.  The flesh eating bacteria in the soil was already destroying all evidence of his presence so there would be no pesky police report to contend with later. 

Another camouflaged assassin had made it as far as the sheer rock wall, moving slowly so he wouldn’t trigger motion sensors.  His hi-tech suit, covering him from head to toe, ensured he blended perfectly with the rocks, quickly mimicking the slightest shift in coloring and shading required to conceal each of his movements.  One of the mountain goats, a Capra Ibex, peeled him off the rock face with its antlers, throwing him.  He landed on the horns of another mountain goat, a Gemsbok Oryx, skewering him.  His dead body was thrown unceremoniously to the ground below.  By then he was beyond hearing his bones shattering. 

Kishi ignored the rest of the briefing her mindchip was giving her on Dr. Vanguard’s latest victims to return to cataloguing the dangers before her.  But then she stopped.  Rather than spoil all the surprises for her on the way back out the door, she relaxed her mind.  Life was supposed to be an adventure, after all.

Once at the castle entrance, she was greeted by a contingent of knights on war horses, flanking her, the knights’ lances touching one another to complete the corridor of honor effect.  But she knew her host was doing more than honoring her.  He was giving her more of a sense of what she was up against if she was planning any funny business.  The knights, their war horses, were actually not separate entities.  They were shapeshifting droids comprised of microbots.  Depending on how sophisticated their programming, those microbots could change into hundreds, if not thousands of weapons all coming for her; the shapeshifting occurring in nanoseconds, beyond an unaugmented system’s ability to even process.  Even more troublingly, if her host was going to this kind of trouble to showcase his jewels, it meant the real treasure was precisely what she was being diverted from detecting; this was all a magician’s misdirection, one designed to get by even her mindchip.  Vanguard wouldn’t have known she was upgraded, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

Another bad sign. 

She had allowed her mind to drift too far from character, thinking, Enough with the gaudy display already.  The instant the words branded her mind, the knights and their war horses disappeared.  They collapsed into two dimensional drawings and then poured through the cracks between the cobblestones.  If the microbots were small enough to take liquid form, it meant that she would not be allowed to leave without eating and drinking something, to ensure that they were inside her, where they could be triggered at the host’s request, ending her before she got any ideas about ending him.  Nearly as troubling: the security scans had penetrated the Faraday cage about her mind; so it was just possible her host had had complete access to her mind from the moment she stepped through the gate at the foot of the mountain.  If so, he’d learned far more about her than she’d learned about him.

Definitely not good.

Her host greeted her at the castle door.  His unpretentious manner threw her; it was definitely not what she was expecting after such an elaborate public showing of his wealth and power.  So glad to meet you, Kishi, he said, shaking her hand.

She was nearly as struck by this handsome, athletic man, who clearly didn’t need to pay for female company.  It took her awhile to realize that his supernatural beauty was on account of his cyberenhancements; nano remolding his face and body, not just into any fantasy figure, but her wildest fantasy.  So much for the Faraday cage around her mind; it was one more confirmation that he’d long ago hacked his way past her best defenses.

Despite the benign, disarming smile, she could feel the nano needles burrowing into her from his handshake.  Even now the tiny projectiles were speeding to her brain with every intent of disabling her mindchip.  If they couldn’t assail its defenses, they would simply wedge in the fleshy part of her brain, waiting for the next heartbeat of pulsing blood to set them off like landmines awaiting the passage of jeep tires. 

Still, Kishi was not particularly concerned.  None of her targets were pushovers.  It came with the territory.  She resisted the temptation to shift to her backup nervous system to better facilitate the Zen master brainwaves.  She would have to surrender control to her higher self at some point.  She was not going to make it through the night in anything but an altered state of consciousness.  For now, she just bowed and smiled back at him.  Most venerable master, it is such an honor to be at your complete service tonight. 

As part of doing her homework on Dr. Vanguard, she’d picked up on the fact that everything he knew about geisha girls he’d learned from lewd comic books.  Meaning that the majority of what he thought he understood about them was sheer drivel.  But there was no point in educating him.  This was his fantasy date, after all.  She’d play it just the way it played in the comics.  Maybe that was why he was so aggressive with his greeting.  The best defense is a good offense—especially when entertaining a geisha girl who only existed in Tantric Comics.  Superhero-grade sex-performance combined with superhero-grade combat; they didn’t necessarily alternate with one another; often times the lovemaking turned into a battle royal between testy parties. 

It finally dawned on Kishi what was going on here, now that she was slipping further into her role as comic book baddie.  Dr. Vanguard was altogether aware of the reputation of the Geisha Girl Assassins of Sing-Sing.  He had to be.  And he’d invited her here tonight to test his defenses because he knew she was the one person most qualified to penetrate them, one and all.  So far, no one had been able to survive a visit from one of the geisha girls.

What was underlying such confidence by an admittedly paranoid man?  Did he have reason to feel secure in his own home, even knowing everything there was to know about her?

She felt herself getting all wet at the thought.

Kishi smiled warmly as she let Dr. Vanguard lead her through his Castle.  Such beauty as graces my eyes tonight, she said, taking in his interiors with admiring eyes.  In truth, she was assessing the latest threats, like the fact that there was no way to learn the layout of the castle.  As soon as they walked through one section, everything changed: the size and placement of the rooms, their function and purpose, their furniture and decorations.

"I’m so glad my home pleases you.  I’m so glad I please you."

There it was again, the teasing reminder that she was entirely transparent to him.  Might I ask what honorable master wishes of me tonight?

I think you know.

She squeezed her lips together tightly, read his eyes to take a greater measure of the soul that was lighting them up.  You wish to ascertain if I can really kill you.

If I can’t survive a night with a geisha girl assassin, all these defenses are for naught.  If I don’t hire you to take me down, it’s a sure bet someone else will.

But there’s no winning this for you.

He laughed.  You’re still so confident after everything you’ve seen?

She smiled at him and let her expression communicate the truth.

But the nanobots I injected you with when I shook your hand...

Hacked and retasked.  She held her arm up to him and jettisoned the needle-shaped bots from the tips of her fingers like a porcupine defending itself.  One of the two droids that had accompanied her from the foot of the mountain, who had been hanging back respectfully, intercepted the needles before they could reach the honorable master’s face, moving at blur speed, much faster than even an upgraded human like herself was capable. 

The honorable master took several steps back.  I should have told you, I prefer to watch.

Kishi shifted her attention to the two androids.  It should have occurred to her that they were his sexbots.  As she’d already noted, sexual prowess and death-dealing prowess came hand in hand with the comic book world the honorable master lived in, a fantasy domain even more enticing to him than his magnificent home.  She bowed to them respectfully.

The two male droids did not come at her.  Instead they went at each other.

Sorin, whose name Kishi pulled off his mindchip, delivered a punishing blow to Rain, sending him into a marble pillar so hard he was embossed there, somewhat spread-eagled.  He rushed Rain before he could free himself, made use of the mock restraint to shove his tongue in Rain’s mouth.  The beauty of both male droids was well outside the human limits; it was also androgynous.  Of the two, Rain had the longer hair.  Kishi wondered if he was the submissive one.

No! Honorable Master shouted.  Male on female, not male on male.  So Kishi knows what I expect of her.

Rain shapeshifted to female form.  The conversion starting with hydraulics pushing out the breasts and retracting the penis.  The hips rounding.  She took her hands and spun Sorin’s head so hard it didn’t come to a rest until it was staring straight behind him.  He staggered back, slowly untwisted his head from a position that was well past what would have been a snapped neck on a human.  He was just in time to catch Rain’s high kick under the chin, sending him somersaulting high into the air—high enough to finish two rotations before he landed, knees bent. 

Sorin stood, stretching the smile across his face as he stretched his knees to vertical. 

Rain grabbed the chain supporting the hanging plant beside her.  The potted plant fell and the pot shattered.  The plant itself used its roots to scurry out of the way and dunk itself in a nearby decorative pool, probably needing the soaking to calm itself.

The chain and the hook at the end of it was clearly a Kung Fu weapon that had merely been doubling as a plant holder.  It wouldn’t surprise Kishi if every decoration in the house was also a weapon.  A plant that could run away and duck itself in water, well out of the line of action, might well be able to do more if it felt threatened.

Sorin did an aerial ballet of sorts, which included a backward somersault, and a slide into the splits on the floor, to make sure his body didn’t make contact with the flailing chain.  When he got tired dodging the chain, he grabbed hold of the end of it, let Rain use him as a wrecking ball.  By the time she’d sent him through the third pillar, the dust from the pulverized marble created enough of a cloud to facilitate his disappearing act.

In the fleeting moment it took Rain to switch to infrared to see past the haze, he was behind her, kissing her on the neck, grabbing her at the waist and ripping out her windpipe with his free hand.  Down that windpipe he exhaled a nanomist.  Meanwhile, he slipped an electric eel down her throat, yanked out of the salt water aquarium that had shifted into view with the ever-changing décor that would make it impossible for the finickiest of interior designers to get bored.

Sorin stood back and watched her twitch as the electric eel lit her up from inside.  He mock danced about her sputtering body, as if they were both actually just enjoying some techno music at a club.  For the eel to cause her to spasm like that, it must have been throwing out enough wattage to light up half of Sing-Sing.  Nuclear powered?  Kishi didn’t feel a further probe warranted at this time.  No doubt the nanomist he’d forced Rain to inhale was busy eroding her compensating mechanisms.

Enough! Honorable Master shouted. 

Sorin grabbed hold of Rain as she buckled at the knees, shoved his hand down her throat to retrieve the eel.  Rain displayed no gag reflex.  If a horse was nearby, it would have gotten sufficiently aroused to mount her on the spot.  Rain calmly regarded Sorin, eyes wide open, more curious than beseeching.  Once Sorin had flung the eel clear of her, back into the tank where it had come from, he pushed her windpipe back in.  He breathed into her once more, this time with the counteractives to the nanites he’d infested her with earlier.  Her body took over restorations from there. 

He brought her to her feet as he lifted himself up.  She looked no worse for wear.

Perhaps you’d like to try, Kishi, Honorable Master said, gesturing with his hand toward Sorin.

Kishi bowed respectfully to Honorable Master, and then to Sorin and Rain.  She had already assessed the droids capacities to self-repair, just how much damage they could fix on their own, and how quickly it took them to heal, as much from their fighting as from her scan of their mindchips and other cybernetic features.  She knew the point wasn’t to disable them past their ability to self-repair; such a garish display would be considered rude.  She was merely to hold her own and alternate between dominating and being dominated, all the while moving aesthetically enough to please a Hollywood choreographer.  She had mind power enough to do that without interrupting her ongoing assessment of the honorable master’s real fortifications, the ones he was continuing to distract her from with the latest drama.  The geisha girls always gave their masters everything they wanted before killing them; it was considered an act of respect.  Anything short of that would merely have been gauche.  But the point remained, she had to kill the honorable master and get out of here alive. 

As she was multitasking so was the honorable master.  Making use of his mindchip to spawn one industry after another to drive the singularity effect.  The designs being broadcasted straight from his mindchip to the prefab factories that were every bit as flexible and able to shapeshift into what was needed of them as this house.  Not just idle factory space would be tasked with manufacturing the new products and services, but the entire supply and distribution chains throughout Sing-Sing would reconfigure themselves in real time.  He could take his space industry from paper-plane stage to finished space-plane in the time it took her to make love to his two droids.  The distracting drama being dished up served as interference for his real mind’s preoccupation every bit as much as it served his security measures.  Not that Dr. Vanguard couldn’t get caught up in the distractions himself; many of these big thinker types could only be drawn out of their heads by extreme beauty, extreme sexplay, and life raised not just to the level of art, but something that could conceivably compete with the virtual world where they made their real home.  That was a tall order, even for Sing-Sing, kept forever on the cusp of Singularity by culling the herd of the brightest of the bright, like Dr. Vanguard.  But the real world could be made sufficiently enticing, if not for the duration, for moments like this; moments the Geisha Girl Assassins excelled in procuring.

Kishi graciously let Sorin make the first move.  It was a bold opening gambit at that, but tactically speaking, ill-advised.  He grabbed the edge of her kimono and spun her in an effort to peel the outfit off her.  As he did so, he found the smart-fabric wrapping around him and constricting like an anaconda.

He had yanked at Kishi so hard and so violently that she was still spinning in midair like a top held aloft by a hydrofoil.  She used the time to her advantage to fling the shuriken concealed on her body at Rain’s joints.  The shuriken had been disguised as tattoos.  The instant she peeled off the fake tats they hardened so they could be flung as weapons.  Rain collapsed on the ground and shattered at the joints.

Kishi kneeled on the floor besides Sorin.  The smart fabric made him behave by strangling him if he didn’t remain in a supine position for her and passive.  She nibbled at his exposed nipples; the smart fabric ensured all his erogenous zones remained available to her, giving his hard-on plenty of room to breathe.  He was fighting mad and squirming despite the pain, but settling down to her touch.  Technically, a droid didn’t need to breathe.  But sexbots also had no way to override the pass-as-human-at-all-costs programming when in lovemaking mode, or risk ruining the fantasy for their owners.

Rain reassembled herself by activating her magnetic field.  She kept the field on even once in one piece.  It was a move Kishi had calculated for, but it would mean putting herself in the passive role.  As Rain closed on her, she became giddy, and giggling, like a human on nitrous oxide. 

Rain used her fingernails to rip through the smart fabric just enough for Sorin to finish freeing himself.

Then he took Kishi from behind and, planting his hands firmly on her waist and pulling back repeatedly, subjected her to his pronounced androidhood.

Rain turned to the Honorable Master.  He gave her a nod of approval to shapeshift back to male form so he could drive his member into her mouth.  They continued to smile at Kishi alternating between screaming and gagging sounds. 

She just needed a few more minutes of this humiliation, long enough for Honorable Master to come to orgasm.  She was hurrying him along now by exaggerating the sensitivity in his penis; he was unaware of her hacks to the nano permeating his organ. 

The instant he came, roaring like a lion, the lions outside the castle roared in response to Honorable Master’s outcry; Undoubtedly, it was a signal to them to go on the alert.  He knew that if she was going to make her move, she’d do it now.

Kishi unleashed her secret weapon.  The mindchip had long ago modified her nervous system, sending out superconducting material to transmit electrical signals far in excess of the hundred meters per second limits of an unupgraded human nervous system.  This backup nervous system was engaged only as a last resort, because it cost her precious physical resources.  But while in blur mode, her brain could also connect ideas and respond to things at the speed of light, taking advantage of the fiberoptic smart cables strung through her brain, quantum measures finer than a human hair.  Even the mitochondria in her brain cells fed on a different fuel once in hypermind, the cells themselves not lacking in numerous other cybernetic enhancements.  She was, with all this, still not as well made or as advanced as a true hybrid.  But against droids, who could also operate at blur speeds and only slowed out of that mode for the benefit of their human masters, she would need to operate at one hundred percent.  The real cost to her:  She could only do it for a short time; they could do it indefinitely.  Literally.  With nuclear fusion power packs, they would never tire.  Over a period of thousands of years, parts could conceivably wear out, but they would have self-repaired long before that.

The droids had switched to blur mode, the more in-fashion term for hypermind, in response to the master’s orgasmic outcry.  Even so, they had a surprise or two in store for them.  Kishi threw off the influence of the magnetic field; her vulnerability to it had all along been an act; her mindchip was entirely protected from it as with the rest of her nervous system.  Honorable Master wasn’t the only one who could afford the most cutting-edge droids and human upgrades.  Her real masters could as well.  If she was a generation or two behind what her clients sported, it was only to convey vulnerability and false assurances.  Her training—at least so far—was more than enough to bridge the gap.

The androids, moving faster than she could, raised their hands in tandem towards her.  They then emitted a sonic blast from their mouths, attenuated and amplified by the sonic massagers in the palms of their hands.  Kishi rode the shockwave, her body yielding to it like a rag doll.  The acoustic attack was one more move she had anticipated.  Their first priority would have been to put some distance between her and Honorable Master.

They didn’t particularly like it when she rose to her feet, smiling.  It took them a second to realize why she could afford to waste the energy stretching her lips.  She had hacked their mind chips.  Both droids began to buckle from the meltdown underway in their nuclear fusion packs. 

Honorable Master was sweating profusely, ripping his clothes off just to get cool.  The irony was that for the first time he was not interested in sex.  He threw himself into the decorative pond.  The water started steaming around him.

What have you done to me? he said, boring his eyes into her.

You forget that you had a fusion pack installed so you could enjoy your tantric sex for weeks on end without coming up for air?

Please, stop it before the damage to my brain is irreparable.  I don’t care about my body.  Put me in a droid’s body.  I’ll do whatever you want.

We want you to keep being you, Honorable Master, she said bowing to him.  You are an inspiration to the rest of us.

I don’t... don’t understand, he said, stumbling, his knee hammering the marble edge of the pool.

She smiled at him, waiting for him to put two and two together.

You’re with the resistance?  But that makes no sense.  Why kill me?  Why not protect me?  You could be the one thing that makes my fortress truly impenetrable.

There can be no such resistance to FutureScape at this time.  We’re just not strong enough yet.  I’m afraid you must die in order to live again.

So you do intend to transfer my brain to a droid body!

She shook her head, and passed her hand over her necklace of sparkling amethyst crystals, each stone he size of a quarter.  There can be no sign that you survived.  I’ve scanned you well enough to reanimate you entirely as you are, down to these last memories.  You will receive your own stone about my neck; it is there that you’ll reside until we can find a body for you.

He gulped.  I didn’t think the scans were that good yet.

It’s proprietary software only available to my true master.

Have you actually reanimated someone with it?

She shook her head.

He swallowed hard yet again.  Feeling everything going on inside him, she could tell his mouth had run dry.

How long will I have to spend in stasis?

You will not be in stasis.  Your holographic consciousness will be fully activated once inside the crystal.  You will be able to continue your work in virtual reality.  But I’m afraid it will be some time before the actual inventions will see the light of day.

But I must have a problem to work on.  Something intractable.  Something big enough to keep my mind from going mad in the virtual millennia that will go by relative to the months and years passing out here.

The resistance believes that if humans are to become gods, then they must be granted the powers to do so, and in a way that doesn’t take away from their neighbors.  We thus support unfettered access to the multiverse, not as mortals but as gods, each god to his own universe.

He smiled.  "Now that’s a problem that can keep me busy for a while."

As Machiavellian as FutureScape is, as determined as they are to hold us to an Age of Scarcity mentality and forestall forever the Age of Abundance to which we both belong, we face bigger problems.  There are challenges to getting off this planet in time before some asteroid takes us out or our sun explodes, sabotaged by alien civilizations that have no intention of seeing us reach singularity and therefore become a threat to them.  We not only have to figure out how to colonize space in record time, we have to do it from under the prying eyes and even far more oppressive intentions of far superior off-world civilizations.

He smiled at her.  Such deliciously big problems you throw at my feet.  God, I think I’m in love.

She smiled back at him, and bowed respectfully.  A pleasure, Honorable Master.  Until we meet again.

She accelerated his meltdown so he wouldn’t miss his beat change.

He collapsed.  Even in death he retained a beauty and a glow, as if his titan’s spirit could only be poorly reflected in his body, now no longer available to cloak his spirit and dim the light. 

She felt the jewel on her necklace meant to contain him grow hot momentarily as it received the last bit of him.  By clenching her fist about the amethyst stone, she was also making her hand into the shape of a heart; she would hold him close forevermore in more ways than one.

The instant the house sensed his heart had stopped beating it chose to show her its other face.

She had had to remain in hyper-mind and in blur mode to accommodate such a complete and fast transfer of all that he was.  The scan of his mind accomplished by the needle-like probes he’d put in her, reprogrammed and retasked with propagating inside him and distributing the hive mind through his grey matter in such a way as to allow his own mindchip to do much of the scan with their input, and then download the details to her.  The master’s probes that she’d ejected through her hands with one of the droids had caught were the decoy.  The actual ones she’d emitted through her eyes at him when she bowed ‘respectfully’ to him; they were too small to be detected by the naked eye and, not expecting an attack at that time, everyone’s defenses had been down.  The fact that she’d been so long in hypermind meant her system was drained.  She couldn’t find her way to the bottom of the mountain now if the droids were alive and willing to assist her, and there were no threats awaiting her.

She had only one chance.  To escape she would need to avail herself of her Zen training.

Dr. Vanguard’s castle desisted with the pretense of being a castle.  In the blink of an eye Kishi found herself in a featureless maze of stark walls that would take a rat a lifetime to find its way out of.  Worse, the walls and rooms in the maze were all shielded, the aberrant energy field generated by every surface meant to sap what remaining mental energy she had.  She would be sucked dry of every drop of mind power she needed even to pump her heart inside of sixty seconds. 

Her hypermind would be out of juice in thirty.  Even with the calm her Zen mind allowed her to exude, and her ability to lower her vital signs, including her heart rate and her breathing, to further reduce depleting her system of precious resources.

There was really only one thing to do.  It had never been done before.  It was a theoretical possibility as described by the man who had upgraded her.  He himself doubted she’d survive even if the idea worked, and if she did, there was an even slimmer chance she’d ever be the same.

But she was plum out of options.

She used her Zen mind to penetrate the veil of Maya, the world of form, in order to enter the realm of the formless, the void itself.  Once there, she would use the power boost from zero point energy to teleport her to the foot of the mountain.  No running the maze, no surviving the gauntlet of deadly animal, plant, and microbial life beyond the castle walls.  She was rather looking forward to playing the game as the Honorable Master had designed it.  Felt she was letting him down for not doing so.  Maybe some other time. 

Five seconds remaining.

She gave it a shot.

When she opened her eyes, she found herself at the foot of the mountain, on the other side of the gate.  The animals roared and barked.  The plants spat venom and noxious gas at her anyway, keenly frustrated their prey had eluded them.

She couldn’t resist a smile.  She was glad she didn’t have to destroy Dr. Vanguard’s home and his wonderful creatures.  Both were worth preserving.  True, even in the dark dawning light of the Age of Abundance, most anyone in Sing-Sing could afford any number of the tech wonders on display on the mountain or in the castle.  But nothing close to the entire menagerie. 

FutureScape would see that one of its cronies took possession of Dr. Vanguard’s property, someone willing to play the singularity containment game a bit better.

For now, they’d won.  And they would continue winning for the foreseeable future.

No matter.  With her training came much patience.

And time was on the side of the rebellion.  All of time.  All of space.  Eternity was theirs.  Let FutureScape have the here and now.  Her Zen mind recoiled from the idea.  The notion flew in the face of her training.  Tough.  She didn’t have the luxury of serving her Zen mind; she needed it to serve her.  For the time being, until her next