After Death(43)
“How you know?”
“She’s an accountant is all she is, not some genius hacker.”
Aleem shivers. His shirt is wet. He forgot to close his jacket after he got the phone out. He zips it up.
Raising his voice to compete with the wind, Kuba says, “So it’s the boy?”
“The boy don’t have gear for a trick like that.”
“How you know?”
“Nobody has gear for that.”
“Somebody does. You see that video? Man, it sucked.”
“Could make a man go deaf and blind,” Aleem agrees.
They are far enough away from their phones to hear “Macarena” playing elsewhere in the orchard.
“Mockin’ us,” Kuba says. “We find who, I’ll give him a livin’ autopsy.”
Aleem says, “Nina’s got to know who.”
“Man, that music eats your soul,” Kuba says.
“Could be worse.”
“How?”
“Could be Abba.”
“Shit, it could be ‘Dancin’ Queen.’”
“Didn’t I just say?”
EN ROUTE
Southbound at high speed in the Bentley, slaloming lane to lane through traffic that is fast-moving yet slower than he can tolerate, Michael Mace is muttering in frustration at the discrepancy between the astonishing mental powers of his life as a resurrectee and the very human physical limitations to which he remains subjected. When he wishes, he is able to perceive the billions of electromagnetic waves—carrier waves—of data that flow through the intricate webs of wires and glass fibers civilization has spun, that also course through the air from transmitter to transmitter, to receivers beyond counting, passing through buildings and people and trees without any effect, television programs and Zoom conferences that are invisible while in transit, streamed music and cell-phone conversations that cannot be heard until translated from digital code into audible tones. Every river of data will wash him quickly to a computer or a network of computers, most of which are sluiceways that will spill him into the internet. He can be in New York in a few seconds, in Washington or Paris or Beijing, or in a surveillance satellite in orbit above Earth. All the secrets that the world so jealously keeps are not hidden from him. However, to help Nina and John in that damn orchard, he needs to be there in the flesh.
He wonders if that is true, if he could have—should have—done more from a distance than use the government’s secret kill switch to disable the engines of the four SUVs, more than turn the bad boys’ smartphones into Macarena locators that revealed them to Nina and prevented them from coordinating their search for her. A smartphone is a handheld computer. Hackable. If he can tap Spotify to stream whatever music he wants to their phones, amp up the volume of the speakers, and magnify the vibrator function, perhaps there is some way to feed a charge to a phone’s lithium battery that will rapidly overload it and cause it not merely to grow very hot but to explode, injuring whoever is carrying it. If that might be the case, he lacks the genius to see how it can be done.
Those who have long predicted the Singularity have imagined that the physical integration of man and machine will lead to all manner of amazing powers, as well as to a radical enhancement of the human intellect, making human beings hundreds or thousands—or even millions—of times smarter than they currently are. The expectation of amazing powers seems to a limited extent confirmed, but Michael can testify that the übergenius theory is less science than wishful thinking, comic-book thinking. He’s still processing events with the same slightly better than average brain that has gotten him through forty-four years of life and a day or so of death.
Perhaps his reflexes are better, even markedly better than they were when he was twenty, because in spite of the rain and the road condition, he’s finessing the Bentley through traffic that’s for the most part doing between sixty and seventy miles an hour, while he stays between eighty and a hundred. He doesn’t need the navigation system that Woodbine left switched off. He knows where he’s going, having entered Nina’s phone and confirmed the location of her GPS signal.
He isn’t expecting a highway patrol car to be parked along the shoulder, radar cone exposed to the rain. On a night when there will be three times as many accidents as usual because of the weather, the police avoid further distracting motorists by declining to give chase to the most egregious scofflaws among them. Indeed, it’s not a radar trap that puts him at risk. After racing around an eighteen-wheeler at ninety miles an hour, he sweeps past a CHP black-and-white, a Dodge Charger, that’s cruising twenty yards ahead of the big truck. Cutting speed now is pointless. He’s already barreling away from the patrol car, already clocked, when the lightbar on its roof brightens and its siren sounds.
He isn’t constantly aware of the infinitude of electromagnetic-wave streams that carry data around and through him, doesn’t see, hear, smell, taste, or feel them in the usual sense. The powerful nanotechnology that was conveyed into every cell of his brain and body by the archaea provides him with a sixth sense that’s difficult to comprehend in human terms. His sixth sense is like a second self. That cybernetic persona, his shadow self, is continuously alert to all frequencies, capable of identifying the systems using them for transmission and instantly “reading” the content. The billions of cells that constitute Michael also compose the most sophisticated transmitter and receiver of data in the world. He contains billions of conventional tuning capacitors paralleled by small variable capacitors, which allows his shadow self to scan the entire spectrum of frequencies and fine-tune to precisely the one he desires at any moment. He is not actively aware of this shadow self until he seeks its service. Then he needs only to think what data stream he wishes to enter, at which point he can see-hear-understand what information it carries. More important, however, is his capacity to control that data stream and insert instructions into it. That is his primitive understanding of how Michael and Shadow Michael work, which in fact he can no more explain than a five-year-old piano prodigy can explain how, after hearing a sonata by Mozart only once, he’s able to play the piece impeccably and with passion beyond his years.