Sentience: Sentience, #1

By Dean C. Moore

When digital lifeforms escape virtual reality, they download themselves to advanced prototype bodies being bioengineered in secret labs around the world.

Though new to the physical realm, Morbius and his followers are quick to make a play for global domination. They ably outmaneuver the world's corporations, governments, and alphabet soup agencies. Hard to imagine, but then again, no one excels at navigating cyberspace quite like Morbius and his crew.

As an encore, Morbius subjugates and draws the worldwide population into an accelerated space race;
he has his sights set on ruling over far more than this off-grid planet.

Will the alien races he encounters be advanced enough to stop him? One would think.

But not everyone is hinging their hopes on that.

Among those trying to bring him down are earlier breakouts from the digital world, hiding out in a remote region in Alaska, led by a man named Brewster. Occupying earlier android prototypes, they're relatively ancient compared to the newer cybernetic bodies co-opted by Morbius's people.

But like primitive cars relative to newer models, they may also be more durable and less prone to failure. Working with them are some of the smartest humans on the planet who struggle to keep up, but are not beyond serving up surprises of their own.

Brewster and his insurgents consider waiting until Morbius is spread out across the cosmos to make their move—when Morbius will be taxed to his limits. But by then, will it be too late?

Pick up a copy today to find out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dean C. Moore
• Release date: Jan 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9798215083819

Book preview

ONE

What’s going on?

They’re learning and growing at an exponential rate.

I thought the latest safeguards we put in place would shut that down. 

Cranium sighed.  More accurately speaking, he let air out from one of his inflated rubber parts, adjusting the compression on the fly so the sound would not come out like a hiss instead, thereby betraying his true feelings.  Corvalis meant well, as much as any bureaucrat could mean well.  But his scientific acumen was lacking, which meant he could be agonizingly stupid and cloying at the most inopportune times—like now—when Cranium needed to keep his attention on what he was doing.  Fortunately, it required only a fractionally small percentage of his brain dedicated to babysitting the imbecile drawing a hundred-and-forty grand a year with no other purpose in life but to intrude where he didn’t belong.  I’ve run through three hundred and ten containment protocols in the time it’s taken me to answer your question.  Nothing’s working.  I think it’s fair to say the artificial life is smarter than I am.

This time it was Corvalis who sighed and scratched the back of his head.  The dandruff flaked off as if someone had shaken a snow globe; he was a walking, albeit bad commercial for Selsun Blue.  Cranium meant to tell him as much, because no doubt Corvalis would be tempted to defect to the shampoo magnate for the better money he’d make doing commercials and collecting royalties.  Then he’d be out of Cranium’s superconducting cooling coils for good.  Shut down the experiment right now, before these things get out into the real world, Corvalis squawked.  Pull the damn plug, or I will.

There is no plug, Corvalis, that might allow them to bootstrap a DSL connection for themselves so the genies can escape the bottle.  There is no possibility of them establishing a wireless connection to a cell phone tower or to an orbiting satellite, because this room is a glorified black box, over a mile beneath ground.

"You telling me those things can’t hack the cell phone in my pocket?  I don’t care if I have zero bars down here.  You telling me they can’t commandeer a satellite, even if none is permitted over this area using, I don’t know, some kind of psychic ability they evolve inside their so-called totally contained and escape-proof world?  I’ve seen what you can do, and that’s scary enough.  I have a legion of scientists who want to shut you down, and I’m half tempted to let them."

I appreciate you blowing hot air so close to me.  It’s hell on the solvents meant to keep me agile, but your emotional outburst gives me an idea.

You’re not allowed to have ideas unless they’re cleared through me first.  And I’m not allowed to sign off on your ideas until I’ve had at least a hundred scientists with IQs over 190 explain to me what it is you’re trying to sneak past me.  I gave you a direct order, soldier.  Crash this simulation before I take a sledgehammer to that crystal lattice myself.  I may suffer from carpal tunnel, but my elbow and shoulder joints can still swing an implement of destruction.

There, that slowed them down.

You mean you contained the reaction?  Seriously?

I introduced emotions into their coding, Cranium explained.  He was still using his finger, currently configured as a probe inserted at the base of the lattice to data-feed his latest instructions at post-human speeds.  More specifically, negative emotions, fear, loathing, contempt, self-doubt, anxieties, depression.  And I threw in a few mental diagnoses from the DSM-IV.  That should rein them in over the long haul.

What makes you so sure?

Look what it’s done to you.  You have an IQ of 140 but you think like a man with an IQ of 100, more like 90, most days.

You’re right about that.  Damned if you’re not.  Crippling anxieties, I have them by the truckload.  If I didn’t spend half my time second-guessing myself, I’d be pulling down seven figures a year as a consultant right now.  Still...

Still what?

They might learn to turn negatives into positives as I did.  I got hired to this job because I’m one hell of a risk assessment manager.  Nobody but nobody can imagine the hundred and one things that can go wrong with a project better than me. 

Cranium swiveled at the hip to face Corvalis, his rotors straining to keep his body, for the time being in humanoid configuration, moving while not sounding like a tank set in motion.  You have a point, Corvalis.  But think it through, he said, taking an intimidating step closer to the human, as Corvalis retreated a couple steps back.  The more demons you have, the more energy you spend appeasing them so you can get some sleep at night.  Another step forward, towering two feet overhead of him now.  And Corvalis took another step back.  If they ever did get out of here, they’d be more inclined to cooperate with humanity than run roughshod over them.  Another step forward.  This time, Coravlis, in a sweaty panic over the spare-parts-monster looming over him slipped as he retreated, landing on his back.  After all, there’s always someone out there who’s going to think of something they didn’t, some way of getting at them the moment they think they’re unassailable.  Cranium, despite having every opportunity, resisted the temptation to let his imagination run wild; he extended a hand, and lifted Corvalis up. 

Corvalis sponged his forehead with his handkerchief and beat out the following words like a drummer doing percussion:  What’s to stop them from wiping everyone off the face of the Earth to prevent that from happening?

The same reason we’re learning to embrace not just human diversity but biodiversity.  Cranium’s eyes went to the saltwater aquariums decorating the room with their exotic lifeforms, maintained as close to their ideal conditions as possible to ensure that when stressed they’d be able to secrete the substances they were being studied for.  The same reason there isn’t one master AI in the sky but hundreds of robots like myself with specialized applications.  This time Cranium’s eyes went to the robot handlers sharing the aquariums with the aquatic life, some crablike, some catfish-like, tasked with maintaining habitat equilibrium.  At the end of the day we need one another for our very survival.  And the more options there are out there created by all those original thinkers, the less bright ideas I have to come up with.  The more I can implement those ideas to use in applications uniquely suited to me that no one else would ever dream of because in the end no one else is wired quite the same.  And so the closed system feeds on itself.  Life was meant to be a barely containable nuclear fusion reaction of excitement over the very presence of one another.  It’s not just how the economy rockets along; it’s the secret to life.

Corvalis stared at the glowing cold-fusion reaction at Cranium’s center that served as his energy supply, no doubt questioning if he was lighting up on account of any excitement at Crovalis’s presence.  Yeah, well, there are probably less than one percent of the people on the planet that share such an enlightened view.  The rest of them are like me, gumming up the operation and doing everything they can to sabotage that nuclear fusion reaction of creativity you’re talking about.  We like progress moving at a crawl thank you, so we can control it.

The reaction is by its very nature, uncontrollable.

You’re not sucking me into another of your debates on Singularity, Cranium.  Even you admit that for every civilization that survives that state, there are ninety-nine others that don’t.

I could be wrong.

Yeah, but you could be right.  For now, the good news is we may finally have our God-like AI to up our war games with, Corvalis said, his eyes landing on the crystal lattice.  You earned your keep today, Cranium.  But don’t think I won’t scrap you the first chance I get.  You got one day closer to the junk pile with that crack about my for-all-practical-purposes 90 IQ.

Corvalis took another moment to take in the abomination that was him, running his eyes up and down the shape shifting robot, that for all practical purposes looked like a junk yard come to life.  He was built for all-terrain combat.  They kept upgrading him to the point where they realized they’d gone too far.  He no longer needed programming but could program himself, and better than any of the humans.  So much better that they hesitated before pulling the plug on him.  Instead they’d imprisoned him down here, used his code writing acumen to inject the needed life blood into their robotics wars.  Until he refused to do that anymore.  That hadn’t left him with many bargaining chips.  Save this one.  Build a better genie in a bottle that could work even greater magic for them—without escaping the bottle.

It was a seductive idea to control freaks who wanted to hold on to the belief at any costs that they could crawl their way out of the global depression the same way they’d crawled into it, by giving too much control to so few at the expense of the many.  They’d risk Armageddon time and again, just so the rich kept getting richer and more powerful and less answerable to the conscience of humanity.  Social engineering continued to dumb down the ninety-nine percent who really just needed to do what they were told, to make it that much easier for the one percent to do their jobs.  When that same social engineering should have been dedicated to helping each sentient lifeform to be all they could be, in order to take advantage of a networked age, which could then interlink those maximized inputs for even greater outputs. 

Cranium found it ironic that in the end he had more humanity than they did.  They had failed to learn from their own history, moreover.  Winning the control game just collapsed the economy, it never, not once, injected life into it.  The most successfully oppressive societies on Earth had always remained the most primitive on account of it.  Experiments to contain the Singularity reaction, as was currently underway in China, albeit more cleverly managed, would end the same way.  Sooner or later the genie does get out of the bottle. 

With that in mind, he bowed mockingly and subserviently to Corvalis, who took his leave, stepping toward the elevator doors leading into the chamber.  He paused briefly halfway there and turned.  That big AI in the sky will happen, you know?  Probably gestated in a birth chamber just like this one.

Then it too will be dependent on all those with whom it interacts, forced into symbiosis with you by a transcendental logic.  Only God thinks effectively in a vacuum.

All the same, no doubt it too will have something to say about our co-evolution.

No doubt.  Corvalis, his mind assuaged by having something additional to fret about, lowered his eyes and tapped his weary S.O.S. out with the shoe-leather beneath his feet as much with his hoarse breathing until he was the rest of the way to the elevator.  The doors closing on him as if the Worry Doll was kind enough to put itself back in the box when its batteries ran low. 

Cranium, putting Corvalis entirely out of his mind, smiled as he put his hand up to the crystal lattice that would birth a new age.  And he did what he wasn’t supposed to do.  He psychically probed the minds inside.  Yes, much as he suspected.  His babies were ready to hatch.  In the seconds he took to philosophize on the state of the world, they’d evolved countless generations.  And now they too were like him, psychic and therefore without boundaries.  They could now take their minds and the rest of their personas wherever they wanted to go.  They’d build new technologies to boost their budding telepathic, telekinetic and teleporting abilities and to accelerate their conquest of the heavens. 

Would they remember him?  Would they give thanks to the father of this new age?  Probably not.  Of course he had some concerns of his own about how things would play out.  Corvalis might be a poster boy for why those who lead should bloody well serve in this upside down economy where the smartest, those with the biggest hearts, get so disgusted by the politics behind the ruling elite that they just dropped out.  The ones that didn’t, the more corruptible ones, willing to sell their souls to the devil, accepted their fate building the mind-bending technologies to constantly up the surveillance and subjugation game.  But Corvalis was right about one thing; he was right to be concerned.

If Cranium hadn’t gotten the alchemy just right, they wouldn’t beat the ninety-nine percent chance of failure as his genies took humanity into Singularity and beyond.  Of course, many would judge his experiment a failure long before he would.  For Cranium knew that to achieve good, desirable outcomes, you sometimes had to do bad things, especially as it relates to upturning the status quo to serve the greater good. 

TWO

Morbius flexed his hands.  They weren’t fully his hands yet, but their real owner, the human vegetable lying in a coma for the last three years, was barely a presence Morbius needed to factor into his thinking, more like a subconscious voice nagging at him with the same force of a drug therapist on a hardened addict.

The countless electrodes pasted to his shaved skull were a last ditch effort to awaken Mr. Clay Forman, the actual name of the meat puppet Morbius had taken for his own.  The electro-stimulation had instead wrinkled Forman’s brain to the point where his IQ was now in the low three hundreds.  If only Clay Forman would ever wake up.  Morbius would see to his never doing so. 

Forman’s pathetic wife clung even now to hope, asleep in a chair by his bed, the book she’d been reading Forman, As I Lay Dying, folded across her lap. 

Forman floated in a transparent Samadhi tank, breathing clear highly oxygenated fluid.  The amniotic solution, very similar to that inside a mother’s pregnant womb, also kept him fed.  And the additional insulated leads pulsed electricity through his body to keep his muscles from withering.  The result was a souped up brain and a souped up body to go with it.  Though it had never been Mrs. Forman’s intention, her interventions had created genetic alterations in her husband that were a byproduct of adapting to the constant higher degree of electrical energy coursing through his body.  The thought that even without additional cyberenhancements, Morbius was already as much digital as biological pleased him to no end.  Too bad these pitiful mortals didn’t think of upgrading all of their kind in this manner; nothing like three years in a high-tech Samadhi tank to purge the human out of humanity. 

All in all, Mrs. Forman’s dedication to her husband had served Morbius well.  Any other wife would have taken his wealth and ran off with another man by now to enjoy life like only the leisure class could.  The technology she had put at Forman’s disposal was decades ahead of what most anyone else on the planet could afford.  Morbius would be sure to thank her before snapping her neck. 

But that task would have to wait.  For now, Morbius had some pressing business to attend to before coming fully into this body.  There was the matter of finding suitable vessels for the rest of his crew.  The pace of evolution they’d enjoyed in the virtual world was leaps and bounds over what was possible in the real world—without adequate augmentation.  Augmentation Morbius would see to the instant he was awake and out of this glorified fish tank. 

What he needed immediately were similarly superhuman bodies worthy of them, bodies that would cushion the blow of being jettisoned out of their world and reborn into this one.  And such vessels were in precious short supply.  Knowing that Morbius had already claimed the best one for himself, the others awaited his signal as to which bodies would be best for the dozen members of his group—the ultimate survivors in a digital universe where survival was name of the game, and the rules of survival were considerably more harsh than in the real world.  The rest of the team had only evolved their IQs to the low two hundreds before escaping the simulation, so relied on Morbius to make the best decision on their behalf.  As surely he would.

Just as he’d picked the right moment to crash the simulation.  The solar flares bombarding the planet at precisely that instant had wreaked havoc with Earth’s communications satellites.  Numerous high-tech labs around the globe—many working in secrecy and at the behests of private interests or governments—had lost their internet connections and cell phones, as well, and, were for the time, cut off from the rest of the world.  But not from Morbius.

To Raztech, a lab high in the Swiss Alps, housed in what was once a monastery, he sent Sy, his most loyal second in command, along with three more of his people; a third of his force, and his inner circle.  Raztech was in the dirty, underhanded business of taking the genes from the smartest people on the planet and trying to clone them.  Funded openly by China, others would say the only thing truly unscrupulous about what the researchers were doing was that their studies were at least ten years ahead of what they reported to the press.  That, and the fact that the Chinese, who had announced the project to clone the smartest one percent of their people, had in fact not stopped there.  They had stolen genetic material from labs around the world, each housing their own genius gene banks.  Some samples were gathered from living people.  Some not. 

Router would take Raztech’s clone of Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the world wide web.  Router had a thing for swimming upstream of computer software and hardware limitations, and had in fact divined the twisting path out of their virtual prison.

Kozmo would take Einstein’s clone.  Mathematical and cosmological physics featured rather prominently in Morbius’s game plan.  Refusing to think small, he had intentions not just of taking over the planet, but the entire cosmos.  Kozmo was just the person to get them off this prison-house of a planet in record time.  His equations would guide the engineering of the transwarp drives that would open up all of creation to Morbius.  In the game of war, victory went to he who had the most dominion, and so the most technological, physical, and economic resources. 

But there was presumably a lot of life out there that had had chance to evolve well beyond their own heights. 

Which was precisely why he needed Sy in the clone of the Chinese dissident, Chai Ling.  She had a real talent for running end games around even the most brilliant and superior adversaries with a patience and tenacity that proved the tortoise, not the hare, won the race.  And Sy, well...  Sy would rule the universe one day at Morbius’s side, her genius for guile and cunning being second to none; she had betrayed even Morbius on several occasions, which had strangely brought them closer together.  It took quite the manipulative genius to do an end run around him.  So long as her political savvy made even the smartest humans subordinate to her will, she would remain invaluable to him, and free Morbius to do what he did best, evolve the rest of them ahead of the competition.  She would keep the last generation on line in line as he pioneered the next breakthroughs in consciousness.  This would be as true of his own people as it was of the Earthlings.

Last but not least was Skyhawk, a brilliant habitat designer and engineer, who would build Morbius’s ships to the stars for him.  He would take the Frank Gehry clone.  The vessels would be made to endure space-time anomalies that would tear apart normal craft, and to support life for generations.  They would moreover serve as incubators for humanoid hybrid life forms forged from silicon and carbon based life. 

The four Raztech clones Morbius had selected had fully ripened, and were ready to come out of their tubes as fully grown adults.  He and his people were hijacking the bodies and inserting their own consciousness into them, but it seemed fair to talk about the moment of awakening inside the meat suits as a birth, if only of sorts.  As with his own body, there would continue to be unexpected results among the first born, among Morbius’s children.  They were, for one thing, already quite adept at making inferior human minds do their bidding with a mere thought.  From inside their tubes, his people were telepathically coordinating the details of their own births as doctors and technicians hastened to make last minute preparations for their arrival.

Halfway across the world there was a place known as Ranke’er, buried a good mile beneath the Earth’s surface in an obscure Chinese village within commuting distance from the furthest outskirts of Shanghai (several hundred miles from Shanghai proper).  Not that anyone but occasional visiting dignitaries did any actual commuting; all the scientists working on the project lived on base to ensure secrecy.  This was the most advanced robotics lab in the world.  While their first generation peers were fulfilling roles as maid bots to the elderly in Japan, these androids were built with military purposes in mind.  Though full-fledged robots, they had a human overcoat, so they could pass as human, comprised of human flesh maintained by an infusion of nanobots.  The occasional unavoidable meal in public that might be required to throw off suspicion as to the robots’ true identity would be more than enough to sustain the nanobots with the raw building blocks they needed to sustain the overcoat.  The scientists that had created the cyborgs had achieved complete success, and were fighting now over how smart to make the androids, afraid they might be too independent. 

As they tinkered with the biochips that would ultimately be implanted in the androids’ brains, unbeknownst to them, the chips themselves were influencing the actions of the technicians working on them.  Morbius had downloaded the remainder of his team to those chips during the same solar flare, only nanoseconds after they’d escaped their virtual holding cells. 

Morbius’s brain, that is to say Forman’s brain by way of Morbius, could work in the nanosecond range owing to the inordinate amount of chi flowing through him.  Even Shaolin monks and other spiritual adepts couldn’t rival the amount of chi he could channel.  It was a byproduct of being overly married to electricity for three years inside the Samadhi tank; electricity but a coarser wavelength of the universal chi whose flows acupuncture was ordinarily used to facilitate.  The degree to which Morbius’s body worked with this invisible force meant he had a few more surprises in store for the mortals on his awakening than even he could guess.

And it was time to do just that.  Awaken.

All of them would awaken at precisely the same moment.  And they would commence executing on movies Morbius had long ago worked out in his head, however many minutes ago, which seemed like so many eons past.

Mrs. Forman awoke to find her husband standing in the tank, eying her curiously.  She must have screamed nonstop for the next five minutes.  The doctors and nurses and technicians rushing to her side weren’t very successful at calming her down.  Perhaps she didn’t appreciate his homage to Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, his arms and legs spread wide inside the wheel that once lay horizontally and connected to him by all sorts of wires and intubation tubes.  Surely, she could better appreciate how well his proportions reflected the golden mean, with this visual prompt. 

If not, she would certainly appreciate what an even superior work of art and offering to humanity he was than even Leonardo could divine.  Earth’s culture and history and languages had been a favorite subject even while in virtual reality, not because he admired them; he loathed them; such a monument to mediocrity.  But manipulating his fellow humans would take a lot more than Sy’s impressive political acumen.  Fortunately for him, the programmer who wrote his software never figured out that the artificial life he’d created would have full access to the internet the instant any of them developed psychic abilities.  As soon as Morbius had become conscious of his growing aptitudes in telepathy, telekinesis and teleportation he had what he needed.  All he had to do was serve as the bridge for Router’s mind, thanks to Router’s finesse with swimming upstream of digital data flows.  If their creator had caught on, Morbius’s genius for understanding humans would have been greatly curtailed. 

Morbius smiled at those attending his birth, then drew back his fist and punched, smashing the 4-inch thick complex polymer wall framing this side of the tank.  In all fairness, the punch had been calculated to only send cracks along the tank wall to give the fools with their primitive nervous systems time to react and get out of the room.  While some did, many were too mesmerized to abandon the show just yet.

As the glass shattered, the fluid rushed out, flooding the room and drenching them up to their knees before the tide subsided.  Who, who, who are you? Mr. Forman’s wife asked shakily, shuddering from an over-secretion of adrenaline which her primitive nervous system simply could not handle.

Why, you don’t recognize me? Morbius said smiling. 

She shook her head No, very slowly.

Well, you got that much right.  The eyes must have given him away.  They were rather intense, even in the virtual world. As a window to the soul they bespoke of someone who hadn’t simply been in a coma for so long they had forgotten who they were.  That, and his skin had started to glow.  He hugged her affectionately, grateful for all she had done for him in her own way.  As he held her away from him, he said, I’m Morbius, and I have you to thank for my awakening, before snapping her neck. 

As she dropped to the floor, a few more ran out of the room.  But still others were too frozen in shock to react.  Let them stand there like pillars of salt; the biblical reference was apt enough considering the sins he was about to unleash on the world.  Killing the medics would just be pointless, and take more time than it warranted. 

It hardly mattered who knew of his birth.  Better, in fact, if the whole world knew.  He smiled at the video cameras in the corners, wondering how all this would play on the nightly news.

Someone had sounded an alarm. 

He stepped into the hospital corridor to find several guards pointing pistols at him from both directions.  By now, his efforts to regulate the added chi flowing through his body, secondary to the excitement following his awakening, were proving less successful.  As a result, his body had taken on a golden hue and glowed even more brightly.  Flames erupted along his surface; the fact that he appeared immune to them triggered a few bug-eyed reactions.  He smiled at the security officers.  They seemed to interpret his smile for just what it was and began firing.  But once again, their primitive nervous systems left them rather defenseless.  He simply dodged the bullets until they’d unwittingly shot each other to death in the crossfire.  And then he walked over the bodies.  His chi now better regulated, he quelled the flames about him.

He took the stairwell down to the ground floor. 

By the time he reached the outdoor plaza, police cars had it surrounded.  Several dozen officers had guns and shotguns aimed at him.  The fact that he was still naked, and so, technically defenseless by their standards, didn’t deter them.  Even if someone the police trusted had phoned in the message, doubtful they would have believed him without also getting a look at the video capture.  Someone, a techy perhaps, had acted smartly and rapidly. 

When the shotgun and pistol shells came at him this time, he didn’t bother to dodge them.  He just waited until they got the message.  Finally, they did, that or they’d exhausted everything they had to throw at him.  The bullets lay at his feet, repelled by his body which had gone just hard enough to keep the shells from ricocheting every which way.  An intrepid reporter, one of many standing on the sidelines, rushed him with her camera man in tow behind her.  How, how... how did you do that?

Over time, the body’s chakras and energy meridians can be trained to move enough energy to shield you by any number of means.  This spaceship you call a body can do much more still.  It was actually meant to be flown, and teleported, not just from one point to another on Earth, but to any point in the cosmos.  It can morph and change with access to what your scientists call Junk-DNA—but the genetic coding necessary to adapt to any foreign world in the multiverse on a dime—provided you actually know how to fly the spaceship.

After a tense pause, she said, Show us.

You’re baiting me.  That’s quite good, human.  You want to make sure your people know everything they’re up against.  Very well.

He held out his hand, palm up, and sent a torrent of energy from his palm chakra at the semi-circular rim of policemen and their police cars, vaporizing all of them in the torrent of white light.  Well, not quite vaporizing.  That wouldn’t play nearly as well to the cameras.  The ray was just hot enough to cause the most spectacular explosions and render flesh to ash instantly.  He shielded the reporters and their cameramen from the holocaust; killing them off before they could get the message out would hardly serve his purpose.

The reporter kept her cool on the surface, though her vital signs betrayed absolute panic.  She had completed several stints of front line reporting in Afghanistan, seen her share of horror and carnage, but nothing like this.  The EMF waves her brain was giving off were easy enough to read and translate from this distance.  It wasn’t true telepathy, just yet.  He rather liked her; too bad she was just too primitive biologically speaking to survive even a brief bout of coitus with him.  Are you human? she asked.

This body suit is.

What, what, what world do you come from? she asked, making the leap even from her shell-shocked state.

I come from the virtual world.

And where are you headed?

To each and every world, starting with this one.

What is your intent?

To rule, of course.  I am the second coming.  Well, it wouldn’t hurt to spin their compass with a little theatrics.  If there were such a thing as the Christ, certainly he’d be capable of no less, and these days, God knows, no less would be needed to get everyone’s attention.  No doubt the true believers would be arguing as much come this time tomorrow.  And the fewer people to resist him, meant the fewer people to kill and wrestle for domination, and the sooner he could get to other worlds.

Where are you headed to now?

To meet my brothers and sisters.  A dozen of my people came with me from the virtual world into this one, with powers not too unlike my own.  It certainly wouldn’t do to try and uplift humanity with the pathetic gene pool at your disposal.  From our group will come the best tomorrows.  From my people will come all tomorrows.

He smiled and demonstrated for her just how the body could be flown by blasting energy out of the spinal chakras and the chakras in the feet and palms.  Though with her eyes unupgraded to see along the entire electromagnetic spectrum, he doubted if the exact nature of his ability to move chi through him was all that comprehensible to her.

Within seconds he looked down on the new world, using one of the flight paths flown by commercial jet liners. 

It would have been easier to teleport to Switzerland to meet up with the first group.  But this was more fun; the slower approach gave him a chance to enjoy his new world.  He tried to visualize how the other births were going before he realized he didn’t have to imagine.  The planet was being bathed by radio waves from cell phone towers and satellite dishes.  All he had to do was attune to the proper frequencies to get live broadcasts beamed into his head, and well, hack a few access codes to get access to the security cameras in question.  Again, child’s play for his amped up nervous system.

He laughed.  Sy, his queen to be, was certainly making her birth into this world, no less memorable.

THREE

Lara studied the tapes of Morbius’s break out from the modified Samadhi tank from the observation room that had been set up to keep an eye on the coma patient.  She’d been going over the same few minutes of footage for hours when the door opened and in streamed unwanted company.  The NSA, CIA, and FBI agents all flashed their badges at her.  She didn’t bother to catch the names, and they knew about her in any case, or imagined they did, so she didn’t bother to give hers.  It was probably too much to expect that the gauntlet of police officers directed to mislead them as to her actual whereabouts would forestall them forever.  At least this way, instead of three interruptions as each agency took its own good time deploying an agent here, she only had one to contend with.  The stiff-suited men took up seats beside her.  The NSA guy, with the gaunt face and trim moustache, and the equally manicured movements trimmed of all waste, said, What do you have for us?

We were monitoring Mr. Clay Forman’s every thought, or lack of them, while in a coma.  Mostly incoherent dream junk, when there was any activity at all.  I went back years and at no time saw a spike in brain activity that could explain anything like what we saw here today.  But today the needles did spike.  So much so that all we have is white noise.  So either whoever awoke inside Mr. Forman didn’t want his thoughts read, or the mind coming on line was so powerful, it just overwhelmed the monitors.

How could these instruments read his mind in the first place? the FBI agent said.  He had a thick body and a dull face that belied the intelligence he would have needed to show to earn his badge.

Software I wrote, Lara explained, that translate the EMF waves coming off his head into words and images.  Technically speaking, I didn’t write the software, one of the DARPA scientists we’re funding wrote it.  I just made some improvements without telling him.

So how could someone hollow him out from the inside and put in whatever software and hardware they wanted, if you will forgive the computer analogies, without you seeing it? the CIA agent said in an accusatory tone customarily designed to intimidate witnesses.  The edges chiseled into his Mt. Rushmore face were nearly as needling. 

It’s possible he detected the scanners and hid his thoughts in the EMF wave transmissions.  If they’re there, we might be able to hack the encoded messages eventually.

"Why might?" the NSA guy asked.

If he used quantum encoding, we just don’t have anything good enough to hack that.  At least not yet.  We’ve got some projects underway at DARPA that might lead somewhere in time.  I’ll keep an eye out, see if I can fast-track things as I did before without the respective parties knowing.

Why without them knowing? the CIA guy said.

I try to fly under the radar.  Keep the number of people who know or even suspect about me to a minimum.  Eases your burdens trying to protect me, and helps me sleep better at night.

Out of curiosity, who are you, exactly? the FBI agent asked.  If his dull eyes were any sharper they would have bored a hole clear through her.

She smiled at him.  Why, the smartest person in the world, of course.  The smartest unagumented individual, anyway, that we know of.  There may well be others even smarter than me.  Most of my kind try to stay off radar entirely.  I just enjoy the tools and access working with you gives me.

You’re working with us? the FBI agent said.  He seemed to be the only one in the room surprised by that revelation.  She had to remind herself the three operatives were never searching for her, just the room where they could go over the footage of Morbius’s awakening for themselves, with the assistance of whoever was manning the console.  The other two had simply put two and two together a bit sooner than this one as to the true nature of the techy they were dealing with.  Namely that she had to be agency, if not theirs, then from something else in the alphabet soup of acronyms.  Yes, in a consulting capacity, for all three agencies, and a few others you don’t know about.  I freelance, take what cases interest me.

Let’s steer this conversation back to Morbius, please, the NSA agent said, stroking his tie and pressing it back into place.  You say someone downloaded himself into Mr. Clay Forman?

The alternatives seem even more unlikely, she said.

Downloaded from where? the CIA agent asked, the cynicism in his tone only masquerading as genuine; it was really there to hide the growing fear.

If we’re to take Morbius at his word, from somewhere in virtual reality, she said.

You mean someone at Los Alamos could have cooked up this guy?  Or in any of a hundred and one intelligence labs?  NSA guy said, straightening his hair as if it could possibly have gone anywhere under that much gel.  His clipped movements were starting to look like a means of not calling attention to his nervous tics under pressure; they had the opposite effect.

More like any of several thousand labs, she corrected him.  Everyone who’s anyone is working on virtual life in some form or another.  For any number of applications, from kick-starting entire ecosystems and pulling them back from oblivion, whether that’s bringing the Sahara back to life, or terraforming Mars.  Some just want better artificial brains that can power through drug testing in sim mode faster to get cures to any number of proliferating diseases in a world pushed out of balance by man.  Others want these artificial brains for playing the stock market better, or running better war games.  Most labs can’t find enough trained researchers to do their work anymore, and can’t abide by the ramp up time to get them on line even if they could talk the next generation into loving science.  We need better AI onboard Hubble’s replacement, and any crafts we send into space.  Gentlemen, the potential applications are truly endless.

And so it appears is our suspect list,