Ability (Omnibus) (12 page)

She normally wasn’t blatant in her affections for Brian, mostly because of Derry’s feelings, but sometimes she couldn’t help but give Garret little digs. She didn’t hate Garret, but she knew his lust for her, and she knew that he did it in front of Derry unconsciously, which hurt Derry’s feelings. Almost as much as Brian had, by hooking up steadily with Michelle. The situation hadn’t turned into a messy love quadrangle yet, but a lot of emotions were at stake, and everyone walked on eggshells to keep the status quo going as they neared their goal.

Michelle had become their fourth musketeer. She knew she was the outsider, but the three never treated her like one. A month after her first Receiver trip and induction learning lessons, she quit her job. Brian picked up the tab on her apartment and her E-V. Amazingly, none of the four ever questioned why they hung out in the boys’ tiny, cramped apartment that permanently smelled like marijuana and an overpowering curry that Garret had made one night with his new culinary skills.

“So if this works, we’ll put the recipe up on the net?” Michelle asked, as the four of them waited for the drug to kick open the doors of perception.

Michelle still didn’t have the big picture. The three didn’t want to tell her everything just yet. It wasn’t that they didn’t trust her, but part of it was exactly that, even though they trusted her enough to pull her into their scheme. No one wanted to take the chance that Michelle would accidentally slip up and announce the plan before it was time. The fact that she’d quit her job so she wouldn’t cause too many questions to be asked was a good sign that they could trust her. That they didn’t know her quite as well as they knew each other was still a reason to not give her the full scope of their plan.

“We’ll make an H-Vis and a normal holo with instructions that everyone can understand, in twenty-six languages,” Brian answered. “And we’ll add at the end that if anyone speaks a language that we don’t, they should dub or caption the holo so everyone on Earth can learn how to do it. We’ll also write up documents in twenty-six languages and pass them around the black networks. They’ll distribute them via N-Torrent, FireFly, Usenet, and every file repository they can hack into.”

“Are you sure they’ll help us?” Derry asked.

“I’m sure. They know I’ve been lurking in the background for almost two years. Finally, a few of the more paranoid ones started doing trace-backs and noticed which threads and discussions I spent the most time in. They demanded that I meet with a few of them here in Austin a week ago when I told them I wouldn’t talk about it over the net. Their curiosity was intense, and after we met up at Century Park and talked for a while, they are definitely on board. I don’t think they believe me yet, but they’ll know within an hour after they get the files to upload. I gave them a list of things they should already have on hand, just to be prepared,” Brian said, winking at everyone.

“Okay. Once the videos and documents are up, then what?” Michelle asked.

“We’ll watch how the net gets saturated with it. We’ll stress that no matter what, when they make their first Receiver batch, they need to hold one pill back. We’re pretty sure that once it goes viral and hits critical saturation, there’s going to be a lot of rushing by politicians and law enforcement to pay a lot of attention to things like Bonus Wash, GardenGreen, and Foyle’s Scrubbing Pads. So everyone has to keep that one pill for the big reveal that will come in six months,” Brian explained.

“What’s the ‘big reveal’?” she asked.

Brian looked at Derry, who nodded her head. He looked at Garret, who smiled and shrugged. Michelle watched the three of them, knowing that there were parts to The Plan that she hadn’t been introduced to yet. She wasn’t offended, understanding that what the group had been working on was life-changing. World-changing. She could barely believe the things she’d learned over the last few months in compressed, thirty second bursts. It hurt her head to try and imagine all of the endless possibilities of a future where everyone could learn anything.

“That’s when we distribute the ‘Brainstorm’ induction modules,” Garret said with pride. He’d been putting in eighteen hour days for the last month, perfecting a new way to compile the newest modules that had grown so large and complex that the server farm had ground to a standstill whenever a single module was compiling.

“So…you’re going to give everyone the formula so they can make the drug, but not give them the module for six months?” Michelle asked, skeptical of this part of the plan. “Why would anyone wait for six months? I mean, other than taking the drug for the psychotropic effect, but honestly, it isn’t anywhere as good as the stuff you used to make,” she said, looking at Brian. “Why would anyone stay interested? Six months is a lot of time when it comes to news cycles and net attention spans.”

“Exactly,” Brian said. “We’re going to release a demo module on the day we release the formula, so that people who make the Receiver can get a taste of what is coming in six months. It will keep them interested, trust me. Our goal will be to stay the hell under the radar of everyone and everything for those six months. It wouldn’t be helpful if we were arrested or we
disappeared
.”

“What’s the demo module?” Michelle persisted.

“That’s the beautiful part,” Derry said. “We plan to teach the world to sing.”

******

June - August, 2045

The upload had completed four hours earlier, but the four were still waiting for the first sign of feedback to make its way across the public nets. It was a plan that they’d argued about for almost three months. Brian wanted to release five modules that taught five different languages, to make sure skeptics couldn’t gain traction. Half the world spoke English, half spoke Japanese, and half spoke Mandarin Chinese. The western half spoke English. The eastern half spoke either Japanese, Mandarin, or both, and at least a third of the world spoke Hindi.

Garret had wanted to teach them something useful, like how to play a musical instrument or how to build a solar cell. Derry and Brian had both argued that most people in the world wouldn’t have access to, or be able to afford a piano, guitar, violin, or any other musical instrument that Garret could make a module for. Same thing for the solar cell. It was a great idea in principle, but people in rural, remote villages wouldn’t have ready access to silicon, wiring, or any of the major components needed to build the cell.

Derry had come up with the idea to teach the world to sing. At first the boys thought it was stupid, but after she’d explained it, they realized how brilliant it was.

“Imagine it,” she’d said during the argument, her passion turning her into a restless body that paced the room. “Imagine everyone in the world being able to suddenly sing a tune. To know how to hold a note in a certain key. Singing doesn’t require fluency in a language. It doesn’t require an instrument or modern technology. Singing is just singing, and if everyone that watches the module after taking the Receiver suddenly can sing in any pitch or key that they are physically capable of, it might actually change the world for the better. We might not even have to try this whole ‘forced evolution’ on everyone.”

“I think we’re getting some activity,” Garret said from his desk.

Everyone else picked up their tablet and refreshed the sites they’d staked out to see if the whole thing was going to be a bust or not.

“Nothing on my end,” Michelle announced.

“Me either,” Derry added.

“Holy shit,” Brian said, staring at his tablet screen. “Check this out.”

He tapped the screen and sent the link to the other three tablets. Within seconds, all four of them were watching a kid that looked like a surfer from California belting out a classic pop tune in a broken, scratchy voice. It went on for thirty seconds, and it was the longest thirty seconds of anyone’s life. The kid stopped singing, told the camera that he was ‘high as fuck,’ and was going to now spend the thirty seconds watching the demo module that would teach him how to sing. The kid was nervous, and he was still skeptical as well, but he tapped the play button.

Thirty seconds later his eyes cleared up, and he looked a bit shaky. He opened his mouth and a haunting, melodic baritone erupted from his throat. The kid squawked like a chicken that had been punted across a pasture, coughed, and looked sheepishly at the camera. “Scared myself,” he said, and started again. This time, it was a tenor voice, a beautiful voice, and he sang “Eyes of the World” for the next three minutes in an impressive display of vocal range. The song had been viral for the last few months, and there probably wasn’t a net-connected human on the planet that hadn’t had the song stuck in their heads at some point.

The four watching the tablet wanted to celebrate, but they’d warned themselves about jumping to conclusions too soon. The kid could be one of the millions of net trolls that had nothing better to do than to be jackasses. As the next few hours went by, the flood of videos of people with a newfound ability to sing kept rising. Brian had stopped watching after the tenth video, knowing they’d hit the mark. He checked the black sites and found a lot of activity, most of it code-talk letting him know they knew that his detractors and doubters had been wrong, that he’d been telling the truth. A few of the trolls complained that Brian should have released something more useful than the ability to sing, but most were amazed at their new ability. There were going to be a lot of sore throats over the next couple of months.

*****

The news broke within twenty four hours that a dangerous new drug was making rounds on the net, followed by more breaking news that a dangerous new holo had been released that could potentially cause seizures, or worse, death. Politicians were on their soapboxes within forty-eight hours, promising to find the subversives who created both of these dangerous new
tricks
that billions were suddenly interested in. All of the jockeying by lawmakers and law enforcement, promising swift justice for what they now believed to be a conspiracy, thanks to the convenient timing of the drug formula and the induction module being released at the same time, only made more people interested.

Soccer moms, Christian dads, gangers, thugs, soldiers, all of the types of people that would have never dreamed of taking a psychedelic substance in their lives, were wiping out store shelves of the products that could be used to make Receiver. In Tennessee, the Save-A-Tron chain decided to act on Governor Farlin’s emergency order, pulling all of the offending products from the shelves state-wide.

Within three hours, the National Guard had been called in to over thirty locations across the state, and soon more were called in from Kentucky and North Carolina under another emergency assistance order. Two hours after that, the Kentucky guardsmen were rushing back to their home state, recalled by their own governor after he’d issued an immediate ban order of his own.

Brian wasn’t particularly pleased about the chaos erupting all over the country, let alone in other areas of the world. Derry was even less pleased, though she at least had hardened herself to the knowledge that it would be like this, and would get even worse in six more months, when they literally blew everyone’s mind. Garret was pleased as punch at the chaos, shouting out things like ‘a strike to the heart of the pigs!’ and other strange slogans he’d picked up from the conspiracy sites he’d been monitoring. Michelle had been patched into many of the psychiatric networks, as well as the academia message boards dealing with psychology. Apparently both of those areas had been consumed in a firestorm of activity, with sites and entire nodes going offline under the load.

*

Within a month, order had mostly returned. New sites had sprung up across the net, helping users acquire the ingredients needed to make a batch of Receiver. Governments across the globe, even the U.N., tried to squash the induction module and the Receiver formula, but there was no way to unplug the entire internet. Scientists had been tasked with figuring out just what the hell Receiver was and how it affected the brain when coupled with the thirty second learning module. Other scientists were on the job of breaking down the module itself, trying to decipher how it worked.

Garret had done a perfect job tweaking the code of the induction modules. He’d set the frequency and the strobe effect to allow anyone to watch it without the drug and be able to sing for fifteen minutes. If the viewer happened to be at least thirty minutes into a Receiver trip, the ability became permanent. They’d debated holding off until they could tweak it to last only a day or a week, but they wanted everyone to understand the seriousness of what was going to come in another six months. The four of them made sure to stress to their contacts how important it was for everyone to keep at least one pill in reserve, just in case the governments happened to be successful in eradicating the chemicals required to make the drug.

That wasn’t likely, considering that the base chemical was a substance that was made in the billions of gallons per year, and could easily be converted into the proper substances for pocket cooking. Brian had been working on a few extra solutions just in case, but after the first six weeks, the reality was that the manufacture of Receiver and the propagation of the learning module couldn’t be stopped, couldn’t even be slowed down. It had been the top story on every news channel across the world for the first month, and still received daily updates after the story died down. A massive bombing campaign by Israel against Iranian nuclear sites and chemical factories helped deflect the story of the new reality that at least ten percent of the population of Earth could now sing as well as any professional voice artist.